The Bonfire I Lit on My Own Ground

Down The Hill

Dwight came down near the end.

He came alone, down the dark slope, hands in his coat. He stood at the edge of the light where the heat just reaches.

He looked at his whole family gathered at his little brother’s fire. On the ground he had tried to buy for a hundred and twenty-eight thousand dollars.

I braced for it. I figured he would be loud. Dwight loud is the Dwight I know.

But he was not loud.

He stood there a long minute. Then he came up next to me, closer than he had stood to me in two years, and he looked at the fire instead of at me.

“I had the chairs all set up top,” he said.

“I know,” I said. “I moved the wagons. I should have told you I was going to.”

He nodded slow. He watched the sparks go up.

The kids were laughing at something Roy said. Neither of us turned to look.

“I always figured the bonfire was mine to run,” Dwight said finally. “Oldest. That’s how it’s always been. Dad, then Grandpa, then me.”

He stopped.

“I never once thought about whose dirt it sat on. It was just the bonfire. It was just ours.” He shook his head. “I guess I ran it like it was only mine.”

That was as close to sorry as Dwight had come in forty-one years. I knew what it cost him, and I did not make him pay any more of it than he already had.

“It is ours,” I said. “The fire’s ours. The ground’s just mine to keep.”

He looked at me then.

“Grandpa knew what he was doing when he split it that way,” I said. “He gave you the part that feeds the family. He gave me the part that remembers it. Takes both.”

Dwight was quiet a long time.

His eyes went to my hand, where I still held the old knife without thinking about it. He knew it at once. You would.

“That’s Grandpa’s Case,” he said. Quiet now. “I’ve been looking for that for two years. Figured it got lost at the hospital.”

“Roy had it,” I said. “Grandpa gave it to him at the end. He gave it to me tonight.”

Dwight looked at the knife a long moment. Something moved across his face that I had not seen on him since we were boys. Then he nodded, slow.

“That’s right,” he said. “That’s where it ought to be.”

He did not reach for it. That was the thing. A year ago he would have held his hand out for it like it was owed to the oldest, and I would have given it over, and I would have kept quiet. He did not. He left it in my hand.

Then he put his own hand out toward the fire, palm open to the heat. The first man all night to warm his hands at a fire his brother lit.

“It’s a good fire, Garrett,” he said. “Hedge?”

“Hedge,” I said.

“Burns hot,” he said.

“Grandpa’s rule,” I said. “Only burn it in the bottom.”