The Nights I Never Told Them About

Why I didn’t tell Darlene

You are going to want to know this part, and I want to say it right.

I did not hide that paper from my wife because I didn’t trust her. Darlene Kincaid has been my wife for forty-one years. She raised two children, kept my books until her eyes got bad, and held my hand through every hard thing there was to hold it through.

I hid it because of my father.

Vinton Kincaid lost the first half of this farm in the winter of 1986. I was twenty-four. We’d had the farm crisis here like everywhere else, high rates and falling land prices, and my father had borrowed against the Fowler ground for a bad year and then another bad year.

He told nobody. Not my mother, not me, not my sister. He kept the notices in the glove box of his truck.

My mother found out from the Neosho Daily News.

The law makes a bank print the notice of a sale in the paper four weeks running, in small type in the back. She was reading the want ads one Wednesday, looking for a used sewing machine, when she came to a legal description she knew by heart.

I was there when she set the paper on the table. I remember she didn’t cry. She smoothed it flat with both hands and said, “Vinton, how long have you known?”

He said, “Since June.”

That’s all he ever said about it. It was February.

We lost the Fowler ground that spring. My father never held his head up again in town, and he died fourteen years later in the same kitchen chair, and I do not believe the two things were unrelated.

I made one promise to myself at twenty-four years old. I would never be the man who let my family find out from a newspaper.

And here I was, thirty-eight years later, in the machine shed with a paper in my hand, doing the exact thing.

Here is what I told myself. I told myself I wasn’t hiding it, I was fixing it. I told myself that by the time Darlene found out there would be nothing left to find out. If I could do it quietly, nobody would have to carry it with me. The kids would never have to look at the old man across the table and wonder if he was a fool.

It sounds noble when I say it like that. It wasn’t, really. It was pride, plain and simple, wearing a work shirt.