The Grave I Dug for My Father

What Lyle said at the truck

People came and shook our hands, both of us, side by side. Old Wayne held onto mine a long time and said, “Your dad would have liked that.” He didn’t say which part, and he didn’t have to.

When most of the cars had gone down the hill, Lyle walked me over to his pickup. He leaned on the tailgate, the same one he’d sat Dad on every Saturday for two years, and I leaned beside him.

“I’m not proud of that card,” he said, after a while.

“I know.”

“No, you don’t.” He turned his hat around in his hands. “You don’t know what it was. Twenty years, Rick. Twenty years of him standing behind me in the field telling me I set the planter wrong. Twenty years of him going to the elevator and telling everybody how good the boy in Tulsa was doing.”

I didn’t say anything. He needed to say it, and I needed to hear it.

“Then he gets old, and he can’t climb up on that machine anymore, and who’s hauling him up here every Saturday? Who’s cutting his toenails? Who’s sitting up with him the night he died?”

He stopped, and his breath came out white. “And then you come in with your checkbook and pay for the whole thing, and you’re right to, and I couldn’t, and everybody in town knows it.”

“Lyle.”

“I just wanted one thing,” he said. “One thing that was mine. Carrying him. I thought, Rick’s got everything else. I’ll have that.”

We stood there a while. Down the hill, Dale’s men were rolling up the green carpet. Lisa and Karen were standing together by the cars, talking low, Karen wiping her eyes with the heel of her hand.

“I wasn’t here when Mom died,” I said. “You and Dad dug her grave. I came up that road two days late and stood at the edge of it in my good clothes like a stranger. I’ve thought about that every single day for twelve years.”

He looked at me.

“I’m not telling you that so you’ll feel sorry for me,” I said. “I’m telling you because you were right. I wasn’t here. You were. And I’ll never be able to pay that back with any check.”

My brother put his hat back on. He was quiet a long time, looking out at the cedars.

“He kept that machine for you, you know,” he said finally. “I asked him every year to sell it. Floyd’s got his own. He said, no, leave it, Rick might want to run it someday. I thought he was just being stubborn.” He shook his head. “I guess he wasn’t.”