The Eighty Acres By The Lilacs

“I’m going to say it now, in front of everybody,” Shawn said, “because it’s the only way I’ll get it all out.”

He turned to me. His hands were flat on the table, the way he puts them when he is trying to hold himself still.

“When I was seventeen,” he said, “I burned down Dad’s hay barn.”

“The little one behind the house. I was smoking up in the loft with a girl from Thorntown, and I dropped a cigarette in the loose hay, and we ran. Eight hundred bales and the old John Deere B.”

I knew about the barn fire. Everybody in the family knew about the barn fire.

It was a story they told at Christmas. I had always heard Jared started it, playing with matches when he was twelve.

“Jared saw us run out of there,” Shawn said. “When Dad came home and started asking, Jared stood up and said he did it. Matches. Just like that. He never looked at me once.”

“I had a football scholarship to Indiana State that fall. Dad would’ve pulled me off the team and kept me home on the farm, and that would’ve been the end of it. Jared knew that. He was twelve, and he knew.”

Shawn swallowed hard. “Dad took his belt to him. Then he made him work off that barn for two summers. Jared hauled hay for the Pruitts at a dollar an hour until he was fourteen years old.”

“He never told anybody. Not Dad, not Mom, not Kim. And I let him carry it for twenty-nine years. I let him carry it and I let everybody laugh about it at Christmas, and I laughed too.”

Kim was staring at her husband with her mouth open. Jared was looking down at the tablecloth, tracing the pattern with one finger, the way Paige does when she does not want to cry in front of people.

“So when he came to me last Sunday and said the bank was going to take his farm,” Shawn said, “I thought, well, here it is. Here’s the bill, come due. And I paid it with something that wasn’t mine.”

He turned back to me, and his eyes were wet too. “I was wrong, Tara. It wasn’t mine to give. I’m sorry I did it, and I’m sorry I never told you. I’m not asking you to forgive me today.”

For a long time nobody said anything at all. Then Jared looked up from the tablecloth, straight at his brother, and his face was the face of that twelve-year-old boy standing up in his daddy’s kitchen.

“I always knew why you did it,” he said. “I didn’t take that barn so you’d owe me, Shawn. I took it because you were my big brother and I thought you hung the moon. You’re an idiot. But I still do.”

Paige made a sound behind my chair, half a laugh and half a sob.

“That’s exactly what I told him,” she said. “In the truck. Word for word.” And everybody at the table laughed, even Orville.

Shawn put his head down on his arms right there on the table, and his shoulders shook.

Jared got up, walked around the table, and put his hand on the back of his brother’s neck, the way their dad used to.

I reached over and put my hand flat on Shawn’s back. I did not say I forgave him. Not that day.

We closed on a Thursday in late November at the title company on the square.