The House That Rolled Past His Gate

The title

In February, two months before he died, Daddy asked me to drive him to the courthouse in town. He wouldn’t say why.

He just sat in the passenger seat of my silver pickup with his oxygen tank between his knees and said, “County clerk’s office, and don’t argue with me.”

In Tennessee, a mobile home that isn’t set on a permanent foundation is titled like a car.

It has a title through the county clerk, same as a pickup. Daddy had kept that title in his Bible for thirty years.

He signed it over to me at the counter. The clerk, a woman named Brenda who’d gone to school with Lonnie, walked around the counter so he didn’t have to stand.

I paid the transfer fee and the tax on the value, which wasn’t much for a 1994 single-wide.

When we got back in the truck, I asked him why he’d done it. He looked out the windshield at the square for a long time.

“Because you put your whole life into that house for me,” he said.

“And because Lonnie’s a good boy, but he’s got his daddy’s stubborn and his mama’s worry, and when he gets scared he don’t think straight. I want it in writing.”

I put the title in a manila envelope in my glove box, and I didn’t think about it again. I was too busy keeping Daddy alive.

He told Lonnie too, I learned later. He just didn’t tell him about the paper.

April to September

After Lonnie said what he said, I went to work the next morning like always.

I gave vaccinations and checked blood pressures and filled out a hundred forms. I did not call anybody to complain about my brother.

I thought hard about what to do. I want to be honest with you about that, because some people have told me I should have done it different.

I could have shown Lonnie the title. I could have hired a lawyer and made him put it in writing that the house was mine and I could rent the dirt under it.

I could have stood in his kitchen and read him every receipt in my shoebox.

But I knew my brother. Forty-six years I had known him. Once Lonnie decides something is fair, you can’t argue him out of it, you can only show him.

And I was not going to stand across a lawyer’s table from my only brother with Daddy four days in the ground.

I also didn’t want to pay rent on a house I owned, to a brother who thought I owed him for three years of nursing our father.

Six hundred fifty dollars a month to sit on his land at his say-so. One bad week and he could change the number again.

So I did what Daddy would have done. I went and talked to Earl Gentry.