The Bonfire I Lit on My Own Ground

Betty from the next farm over told about Grandpa pulling her car out of the ditch with a chain and a cuss word in nineteen seventy-one.

One of the uncles told about the harvest the rain would not quit, when Grandpa ran the combine through a two-hour dry spell at midnight with every yard light on the place pointed at the field.

Then somebody told the hay-wagon meteor story. The one Dwight had cut me off telling the year before. A different cousin told it this time, and the kids leaned in the way they had leaned in for me, and I let it be told and did not say a word about whose it was.

The kids got quiet and listened the way kids do when the stories are old and true. The fire popped and the sparks went up.

For a little while the dead man was in the middle of all of us like he had never left.

Roys Knife

It was Roy who did the thing that put me on the ground, in a manner of speaking.

He had gone quiet for a while, the way the old men do. Just watching the fire with his coffee going cold in his hand.

Then he came over to where I stood. He reached in his coat pocket and took out a knife.

I knew it before he had it all the way out.

It was Grandpa’s pocketknife. A worn old Case with yellow bone handles gone brown at the edges. The one Grandpa carried for fifty years and used for everything from cutting twine to peeling an apple for a grandkid.

I had wondered where it went. I had figured Dwight took it with the home place.

“Your grandpa gave me this at the hospital,” Roy said. His voice was not steady. “Last time I saw him. Said he wanted me to carry something of his.”

He turned it over in his old hand.

“I been carrying it two years and it never felt right. It’s a Nelson knife. Belongs with Nelson blood, at a Nelson fire.”

He put it in my hand and closed my fingers over it. It was warm from his pocket.

“He’d have lit this one,” Roy said. “Right here. You know he would.”

I could not say anything.

“Your brother’s got the ground up top and the name on the big part, and that’s fine. That’s how your grandpa wanted it.” He looked at me. “But this bench was Earl’s heart, son. He gave it to the grandson who’d light it right.”

He nodded once at the fire.

“You lit it right.”

I stood there with my grandfather’s knife in my fist and the heat on my face so nobody could tell the difference. I nodded at Roy, and he nodded back.

That was all the two of us needed to say about it.