I had made him a chart on the back of a feed-store calendar. We colored in a square for every five dollars toward two hundred.
By the third week of October the chart was most of the way colored. He was talking about the rifle like it was already leaning in the corner of his room. He had picked out the one he wanted in a flyer. He slept with the flyer.
So when I say my brother took a hundred and sixteen dollars out of that can, hear me. He did not take money.
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He took October. He took the thing a boy had made out of his own two hands to prove to himself that he was the kind of person who could want a thing and go get it.
Here is what I decided standing at that sink. I was not going to let Rick take that too.
The money was gone, maybe. The lesson was not his to steal.
My Brother Rick
I should tell you about Rick, because a story is not fair unless you tell the whole of a man. My brother is not a cartoon.
Rick is three years older than me. When we were kids he taught me to bait a hook and ride a bike and drive our daddy’s old International out in the back field before my feet could reach the pedals right.
There was a time I would have told you he hung the moon.
Something came loose in him in his thirties. He lost the warehouse job when the plant cut the second shift. He got behind on a truck he never should have bought.
His wife left and took their girl to Dayton, and I do not fully blame her, though I will not say the rest of it.
He started drinking the kind of steady, quiet drinking that does not fall down in the yard. It just wears a man thinner and thinner until there is not much left but the wanting.
He had come by that Thursday, like I said, when Dale was gone. He sat at my table and I fed him pork chops and he would not look at me straight.
He asked me twice if I was doing all right for money. I know now that was not him offering. That was him measuring.
He left around nine. He said he was going out to the barn to look for a socket set he thought he had left out there. I let him. He was my brother, and it was our daddy’s barn before it was ours, and I did not stand over him.
That is the part I had to sit with. I handed him the barn.