The Lane I Cut Around My Brother’s Gate
Saturday Morning
Saturday came up bright. One of those April mornings in south central Nebraska where the sky is enormous and empty and the wind has not started yet. The fields were bare, last year’s stubble gone pale.
I put my hair in a ponytail and pulled it through the back of Mike’s old seed cap. I put on a gray hooded sweatshirt and my work gloves, and I went out with Dad’s steel rake.
At a quarter to seven, the first dump truck came west on the county road and turned in over Mike’s new culvert. It was Walt’s son, Jeff, in the pit’s tandem.
Right behind him came three pickups. Walt climbed out of the first. Gene Hollister, who farms east of the church, climbed out of the second. Ron Stiles, the county man, who sits two pews behind us on Sundays, climbed out of the third on his day off.
And out of the back of Walt’s pickup came Hank Pruitt, eighty one years old, who had not missed a church workday in fifty years and was not about to start.
So there were four of them, four older men in work coats, each with a scoop shovel or a rake, standing at the head of my raw new lane in the April sun.
“Where do you want it?” Walt said.
“Start at the house end,” I said. “Work back toward the road.”
“Your dad would’ve started at the road,” Gene said.
“Dad isn’t driving the truck,” Walt said. “Start at the house.”
Jeff backed the tandem all the way down the new lane, slow, testing the clay. It held. He tipped the first load near my yard, and the gravel came off the bed in a long gray roar.
I had the dozer spread it. Then the men went at the edges with shovels and rakes, pulling it out flat, kicking the big rocks into the low spots, the way men who have built a hundred field roads do it without talking.
Jeff went back to the pit for the second load. Gene’s grandson brought the second truck, a single axle from the co-op, loaned for the morning. Walt had made calls I did not know about.
Pastor Dale Ames called at seven thirty from his own farm. Dale is sixty one and still farms two hundred acres on the side, because a country church does not pay enough to live on. He keeps an old tandem dump for hauling his own rock.
“I’ve got the last run,” he said. “Walt’s loading me at eleven. Don’t let those boys finish without me.”
The Loads
By nine o’clock we had six loads down.
The sun was warm on my back. I had pushed my sleeves up. Hank was leaning on his shovel telling a story about the winter of ’49, when the county was snowed in for three weeks and they flew hay to the cattle.
“Flew it?” I said.
“Out of a cargo plane,” Hank said. “Dropped bales right out the door. My dad stood in the yard and caught ’em like a ball player.”
“He did not catch hay bales,” Walt said.
“He caught one,” Hank said. “Broke his collarbone. Never happier in his life.”
Nobody said Kurt’s name. Not once all morning. I noticed that. I think every one of them had decided ahead of time not to.
But they could all see the green gate from where they stood, a couple hundred yards east, locked across Dad’s old lane behind his barn. They could see the farmhouse past it.
Around ten, Gene paused and leaned on his rake and looked over there for a long minute.
“I’ll say one thing,” he said. “And then I’ll shut up.”
“Gene,” Walt said.
“Your dad,” Gene said to me, “would not have let this happen.”
“Dad didn’t write the lane down either,” I said. “Nobody did. That’s on all of us, Gene. Not just Kurt.”
Gene looked at me like he had not expected that. Then he nodded and went back to raking.
Seven loads. Eight. Nine.
Word moves fast on a gravel road. By ten thirty, more than one neighbor had slowed down on the county road to look at the new lane coming off the section line, with the trucks on it and the men raking.
Everybody out there knew whose yard the green gate was in. Nobody needed it explained. A new lane running right alongside a locked gate tells its own story.
I did not feel good about that. I want to be honest. I did not cut that lane to shame my brother in front of the township. But I knew it would, and I cut it anyway.