The Fence Line Between Two Brothers

Rain

The third Saturday it poured.

I would have called it off. It was a cold rain with a little sleet in it, and the ground went to gumbo, so every step pulled at your boots. I stood in my kitchen at five-thirty with my coat on and thought, he won’t come.

Then I thought, you don’t know that.

He was at the gate. His truck had a coat of mud up to the door handles, and he was standing in the bed under the edge of a blue tarp, dealing staples out of a box into his coat pocket one at a time like a man dealing cards.

We worked in it. The gloves were soaked through by eight o’clock, and around ten we were stretching a long span when the chain jumped.

I don’t know how else to say it. The stretcher chain slipped its hook, and the wire, which had been under a couple of hundred pounds of tension, whipped back along the line like a snake. I had my left forearm up. It caught me from the wrist nearly to the elbow, four barbs across the skin, and I felt the sleeve of my coat open up and then the wet heat inside it.

“Roy!”

It was the first time he had said my name since the church basement.

I stood there looking at my arm. I remember I was thinking, that was a good coat. Curtis got to me in about four steps. He pulled the bandanna from around his neck, a red one, soaked, and took my wrist in his hand and wrapped it twice around the worst of the cuts and knotted it with his teeth. His hands were shaking and his hands were sure, both at once.

“Tetanus,” he said. “When’s your last.”

“Two years. The thing with the tractor.”

“Okay.” He breathed out. “Okay. Sit down.”

“I’m fine.”

“Roy. Sit.”

I sat on the tailgate of his truck, in the rain, with his bandanna wrapped around my arm. He stood in front of me with his hand on my shoulder the whole time, as if I might go over backward. Neither of us looked at the other. He kept looking at the bandanna. After maybe two minutes I realized I could feel him breathing through his hand.

Marilyn made me go to the clinic that afternoon. Eleven stitches, and the PA said I had been lucky. I told her I had a brother who tied a good knot.

The next morning, a Sunday, there was a package on my porch. It was a pair of leather gloves, new, the good kind with the long gauntlet cuffs. Size large. There was no note. Curtis had never in his life known a thing about what I wore, and he had gotten the size right.