Three Old Farmers and a Locked Door
I had not known that. Four years in that house, and he had never said a word to me about August.
“There’s one more thing,” Marv said. He looked uncomfortable. “Bruce also asked us to keep an eye on you. He didn’t say it like that. He said, ‘Judy’s going to need her neighbors.’ That’s all. I took it for an old man’s worry.”
I put my hand over my mouth, then, for a minute. Arlene set a cup in front of me.
When I could, I asked for what I had really come to ask. It was not much. I asked for the three of them and their combines at the home place at nine Saturday morning, when the dew was off. I asked Dewey, who was careful with paper, to write down every load as it left the field, with the weight tickets from the Alma elevator, so there would be a plain count. That was all.
“That’s it?” Dewey said when I called him. I had put Marv’s phone on the table and the three of them were on speaker, Dewey from his kitchen, Ed from his truck. “You want us to cut beans.”
“I want you to cut Dad’s beans,” I said. “It’s what you do.”
“Roger’s going to be there Saturday,” Ed said slowly. He was a thinking man, Ed, and he had started to think.
“I imagine he will.”
“With the real estate fellow.”
“Kent Dobbs, yes.”
A long quiet came over the speaker, with the sound of Ed’s truck idling in it. “Well,” Ed said. “I guess we’ll all be there, then.”
I did not ask them to say a word to my brother. I did not ask them to be angry for me, or to take a side, or to do anything except what my father had already asked them to do in August. I asked for three men and their machines.
I slept that night in Arlene’s spare room under a quilt that smelled of cedar. Before I turned in, I called Jeannie at the motel. She had a noon flight home to Tucson, and a husband waiting, and there was nothing she could do from a seat on a plane. I told her it was handled, that I would call her Saturday night, and that Roger had been “difficult about the house.” It was the first lie I had told that year, and I told it small.
My pills, I noticed, were in the right slot for Friday. Roger had put them in the Ziploc by day of the week. I turned that over for a long time. A man who does that has not left everything behind. A man who does that is lost somewhere he does not know how to get out of.
I did not know yet what had put him there.