The Fence Line Between Two Brothers

I stood at the edge, watching him. I am not sure when I decided. I had planned to say it a hundred ways on the drive over, every Saturday, and every Saturday I had lost my nerve by the cattle guard. But standing there above him, with the creek talking behind me and the sun just coming over the top of the cottonwoods, I understood that I would never have a better place or a worse one, and that Dad had not written his note for the fence.

“Curt.”

He stopped digging. He did not look up.

“I had my thumb on your name,” I said. “That Sunday. In the hall by the window. The doctor had just told us, and I took my phone out, and I had my thumb on it. I stood there maybe a minute. And I put it back in my pocket.”

The creek ran. A killdeer called from the gravel bar.

“I told myself Dad would call,” I said. “But that’s not why. I thought, let him wait. I thought, let him see what it costs. Mom asked for you every Sunday for nineteen weeks, and I was the one who stood there and said Friday, and I wanted you to feel it. I wanted you not to be there. That is the truth of it. I have never said it to anyone. I let you think it was the timing.”

My voice broke on the last word. I had not thought it would. I am a man who has buried both parents and a brother-in-law and a good dog, and I had not once in those years made a sound like that in front of another person.

I kept my eyes on the water.

For a long time Curtis said nothing. Then he stood the shovel against the side of the hole, very carefully, as though it might go off. He climbed out. Mud to his thighs. He stood there on the bank a few feet from me, with his hands hanging open, and I made myself look at him.

“I knew at Christmas,” he said.

His voice was rough. It was not angry. I had been braced for angry for eleven years.

“She sounded like paper on the phone, Roy. Like you could see through it. I called her on the twenty-sixth, and I hung up and stood in the kitchen, and Joan said, what is it, and I said, nothing, it’s the connection. It was not the connection. I knew. I had a bridge in Concordia, and I didn’t have a bridge in Concordia, I had a man I could send, and I didn’t send him. I kept driving up on Fridays because Friday was the plan. I was afraid if I came on a Tuesday I would have to know.”

He wiped his face with the back of his glove and left a stripe of mud across it.

“When you said that to me in the basement, you were right. I hated you for it for eleven years because you were right. It was a lot easier to be mad you didn’t call than to be ashamed I didn’t come.”

“I should have called.”

“I should have come.”

“I should have called,” I said again, because I couldn’t think what else there was.

“I know,” he said. “I know you should have. And you know.” He stopped. He looked down at the hole. “Okay.”

It was a very quiet word. I had heard him use it a dozen times since March. It had meant “I have the other end of that wire” and “pass me the staples” and “sit down, you’re bleeding,” and I had stopped hearing it as a word at all. Now I heard it for what it was. It was a man putting something down.

“I’m not going to sell my half,” he said.

I let out a breath I think I had been holding since February.

“I figured you’d already called Dennis.”

“I did call Dennis,” Curtis said. “I called him to ask what it would take to hold it together. Joan wants a place to put the grandkids in the summer. I wanted…” He shook his head. “I didn’t want to sell Dad’s place to a stranger just so I could go on being mad at you.”

He almost smiled. It got partway to his mouth and stopped there, a little crooked, and I knew that crooked place. I had seen it on our father’s face for sixty-four years.

“You going to stand there,” he said, “or are you going to hand me that post?”