The Bonfire I Lit on My Own Ground

Bring The Wood And Keep Quiet

This year he called me on a Tuesday in the middle of October. I was out in the shop and I had to pull my glove off to answer.

“Bonfire’s the twenty-fifth,” he said. No hello. Dwight does not waste a hello on his own brother.

“I need you to bring the wood again. You got all that hedge down along the creek and it burns good.”

I told him I could do that.

“And Garrett,” he said, and there was a little pause. The kind a man puts in before he says the thing he actually called to say.

“Keep it simple this year. Last year you were going on to Roy and them about the creek bench and the old days and how Grandpa did it.”

I did not answer. I just stood there.

“People don’t want a sad night,” he said. “They want to have a good time. So bring the wood, and just, you know. Keep it light.”

I stood in the shop with the phone against my ear and a cold feeling going down through me that had nothing to do with the weather.

He was not just telling me what to haul. He was telling me my place.

Bring the wood, because you have the hedge. Keep quiet, because your memories of our grandfather are a bother to the party.

Come if you want. To the fire I am throwing, on the ground you happen to hold the deed to.

“It’s my ground, Dwight,” I said. I said it quiet. I was not even sure he heard me.

“It’s the family’s ground,” he said, like that settled it. “Always has been. Grandpa just put your name on the low part.”

“Bring the wood by Thursday. I want to stack it early.”

He hung up before I could answer. He usually does.

I did not sleep much that week.

My wife, Jen, told me to just let it go, the way she had told me to let it go for two years. Let Dwight have his party.

It was not worth a feud at Christmas, she said. She was not wrong about the cost of a feud. She had sat through enough silent holidays to know.

But I kept coming back to the thing Grandpa said when I was fourteen. A fire on your own ground is a different thing.

I had let Dwight move the fire off the bench. I had let him call it his. I had hauled his wood and kept my mouth shut and swallowed it.

Every year the swallowing got a little easier. That scared me more than the choking had.

I thought about calling him back and telling him flat out. The bonfire was on my land, and I would run it where Grandpa ran it or not at all.

I thought about it for about a day. The reason I did not is the same reason I had kept quiet for two years.

If I called Dwight and told him to get off my ground, I would be the brother who used a lawyer’s piece of paper to split the family over a fire.

Every cousin would hear that Garrett pulled the deed on Dwight. Grandpa would be in the ground not three years, and his two grandsons would be done with each other, and my name would be on the fight.