The Lane I Cut Around My Brother’s Gate

The Kitchen Table

Mike came home from the implement shop at five thirty with his welding hood under his arm and black on his forearms. I told him about the gate before he got his boots off.

He stood in the kitchen a long time. Mike is not a loud man. When he gets angry he gets quiet and very still, like a tractor idling in a shed.

“I’ll go talk to him,” he said.

“Not tonight,” I said.

“Tara, he’s charging you to get to your own house.”

“I know what he’s doing.” I set the plates down. “I’m asking you to wait a week. If I’m wrong, you can go over there and say whatever you want, and I won’t stop you.”

He looked at me, and then he looked at Lily, who was pretending to do spelling at the end of the table and was listening to every word. He nodded and went to wash up.

After the kids were in bed, Mike sat across from me with a cup of coffee he did not drink.

“You know you could take him to court,” he said. “Some judge would probably give you the lane. You’ve used it eleven years.”

“Probably,” I said. “And then every Christmas for the rest of our lives, Lily and Gus would sit at a table with an uncle we sued. I’m not doing that to them. I’m not doing it to Dad, either.”

“So you pay him fifty a month forever.”

“No,” I said. “I don’t think I do that either.”

What Kurt Was Carrying

I want to be fair to my brother, because I was not always fair to him in my head that spring.

Kurt is six years older than me. When I was little he let me ride on the fender of Dad’s old Farmall and held the back of my coat so I would not fall off. He taught me to drive a stick in the pasture when I was eleven.

He married young, divorced young, and came home to farm with Dad when nobody else would. He did the hard years. He was there in ’12 when the wells pumped all summer and the corn still burned up.

The fall before the gate went up, Kurt bought a new planter. A twelve row. He had been nursing Dad’s old eight row along for years and it finally cracked a frame.

I knew he had signed a note on it at the bank in town. I did not know how big the note was, or that the bank had called him in that winter and told him they wanted to see more cash coming in.

I learned all that later. That March, all I knew was the gate.