Three Old Farmers and a Locked Door

“Judy,” he said. “You’re up.”

“Roger, my key doesn’t work.”

“No.” He took a sip. “I had the locks changed. House is estate property. I’m the executor, and it’s my job to secure it. I’ll need you out by the thirty-first.”

We had buried our father the afternoon before. Bruce Pruitt, 88 years old, a farmer for sixty-six of them, laid down in the Alma cemetery beside our mother under a sky so blue it looked painted on. My hands still smelled of the graveside if I held them close.

“The thirty-first of October,” I said.

“Of this month, yes. That’s four weeks. More than fair.” He nodded at the garbage bags. “That’s your clothes, and your medicine, I made sure of that. The rest I’ll box up. Kent Dobbs is coming Saturday with the sale folks to walk the place. I’d rather you weren’t here for that.”

Drew was looking at his boots. Drew was 33, a quiet, big-shouldered boy who ran a crew for the county road department and had once, at nine years old, cried over a calf that died in a March snow. He did not look up.

I did not feel rage. I felt cold, the cold you get when you carry a full bucket across a muddy yard and the handle comes off.

“The house,” I said. “Dad’s chair. The hospital bed is still in the front room, Roger. I haven’t had it picked up yet. There’s his hearing aid in the dish by the sink.”

“I’ll set them on the porch.”

“Mama’s recipe box.”

“I’ll set it on the porch.” He said it patiently, the way you would to somebody slow with her change. Then he looked past me at the long field behind the barn and said, mostly to himself, “No reason to drag this out. This place will bring a very good number if it’s handled right, and the quicker the better.”

Roger was four years older than me. When I was eight and fell through the ice on the stock pond, he lay flat on his belly and crawled out to me with a cottonwood branch, yelling the whole way at me to stop kicking. He left the farm at twenty-two and spent eleven years working for other men’s tire stores up and down the Platte. In 1994 he opened his own alignment shop in Grand Island, and for twenty years afterward we all told ourselves he was doing well.

Somewhere in there he stopped being the boy who crawled out on the ice.

I put the garbage bags and the Ziploc in the back seat of my Buick, and Biscuit climbed in on top of them. Roger watched me, and I think he was waiting for the argument, because he said, “Judy, don’t make this ugly,” and I said, “I won’t, Roger.”

I meant it. I have never in my life been a woman who screamed in a farmyard, and I was not going to start on the day after my father’s funeral with his grandson standing there looking at his boots.

I started the car and drove down the lane.