The Folder My Cousin Could Not Lose
He lowered himself into his chair, the one by the window where my mother kept her African violets. “I did the figuring,” he said. “The Social Security and the VA keep the lights on. Your mother’s hospital bills still take $450 a month of it. The bill’s $2,571. I paid $2,499 last year and $2,436 the year before, and the money your mother and I put by is gone. That CD is gone, Dennis. I don’t have it for the next one.”
“You’d sell your house over a tax bill?”
“I’d sell it before I’d let the county put a certificate on it,” he said. He tried to make it a joke. It was not a joke. “There’s a room at the Veterans Home. Bernie Kolb says it’s clean.”
I sat down across from him. It was then that I noticed I could see my breath.
“Dad. How warm is it in here?”
He did not answer fast enough.
I got up and went to the hall. The thermostat said 54. The furnace he had put in himself, and kept running like a clock for 29 years, was ticking over in the basement at the lowest setting it had. My father, who had spent two winters as a boy in a house with no heat, was sitting in his own kitchen in his coat and his cap to save on the gas bill.
I turned the dial to 70 and heard the burners catch. I drove to the Cenex and bought him a hot coffee and a bag of the fried pies he likes, and set them in front of him. He looked at me the way he did when I was nine and he caught me in the machine shed with his chisel set.
“I’m fine, Dennis.”
“You’re not fine. You’re 83 and you’re sitting in a cold house over $1,700 a year. Over Rhonda.”
“She’s Lyle’s girl,” he said quietly. “You leave that be.”
If you have never lived in a small town, you may not understand why a grown man would let a thing like that go for three years. Let me explain.
My father’s brother, my uncle Lyle, was two years younger, and the two of them split the world like boys splitting an apple. Lyle was the funny one. He drove a Dodge pickup with a loud muffler, he could sing, and he farmed rented ground east of town and sold seed on the side. My father had come home from Vietnam in the summer of 1967 and gone to work on the home place with my grandfather. I was 18 months old by then, because I was born in February 1966 and he shipped out that August, and the first thing he did was pick me up. He used to say I looked at him like a man who had wandered in off the road.
When my grandfather died in 1979, he left the home place, a quarter section north of town, to my father. Lyle got a pocketwatch. By the time I was in high school, Lyle had decided my father had cheated him. He said so at the Legion hall and at my grandmother’s funeral and every Christmas to anyone who would listen, and my father, who could not say a bad word about a man who was down, said nothing. We lost that side of the family the way you lose a tooth, a little at a time, and one day it is gone.