The Bonfire I Lit on My Own Ground

The Match

The wind came off the creek the way it always does after dark in late October. Cold and low to the ground, smelling of wet leaves and cut stalks.

I crouched at the base of my woodpile with a kitchen match cupped in both hands. Up the hill, maybe three hundred yards off, my brother’s bonfire sat black against the sky.

Dwight had stacked his pile tall and square, and it was waiting there, unlit.

He had built it where the driveway runs in, close to the gate, easy for everybody to find. He had strung a work light off his truck and set out two rows of folding chairs.

He had planned the whole thing like he plans everything. Which is to say he planned it like it was his.

The trouble was the ground under both our woodpiles belonged to me.

I struck the match on the box and held it to the twist of newspaper I had shoved under the bottom pallet. It caught slow. Then the dry hedge above it took, and in half a minute the fire was climbing.

I stood up and backed off a step. I watched the first sparks lift off the creek bottom into the dark.

I was forty-one years old. That was the first fire I had ever lit on the back forty without somebody telling me where to stand to light it.

What Grandpa Left Me

Grandpa Earl died in March, two springs back. The week after we buried him, the family sat in the lawyer’s office in town and found out how he had split the farm.

Dwight got the home place. The good flat black dirt north of the road, the machine shed, the grain bins, two hundred and twenty acres that had grown a corn crop every year since before I was born.

He was the oldest. Nobody argued it, least of all me.

I got the back forty. Forty acres of creek-bottom ground along Spoon Branch, low and prone to flood, good for pasture and hay and not much else.

There was no house on it, no bin, nothing. Just the creek and the timber and the one high bench of ground where Grandpa had always had his fire.

I remember Dwight’s face when the lawyer read it. He did not look angry.

He looked the way a man looks when something he already assumed gets confirmed. Like the will had just agreed with him. The home place to the oldest, a scrap of bottom to me.

In the parking lot after, Dwight clapped me on the back the way you clap a man you feel sorry for.