“You weren’t there,” he said. “When I found him. It was almost dark. He was lying on his back and I thought he was dead. His eyes were open and I thought he was dead, Tam. I was standing there with a battery charger in my hand and I thought my dad was dead in the dirt.”
His voice did not break. It just went very flat.
“Then he said my name. And I got down on the ground and held his head, and he kept telling me he was sorry for the trouble. Sorry for the trouble. Lying there with his ribs broke.”
He looked at the rag in his hands.
“I haven’t slept right since. I close my eyes and I see him at the bottom of that ladder. So I sold the bins so he couldn’t climb them. And I said what I said because if I didn’t say it mean, he’d have argued, and he’d have won. He always wins.”
I did not know what to say for a while. I thought about my brother kneeling on frozen ground in the dark. I thought about the fact that nobody, not one of us, had asked him how he was doing in five months. We had all been too busy being angry at him or sorry for Dad.
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“You could have just told him that,” I said finally. “That you were scared.”
“He’d have told me not to worry.”
“He would have,” I said. “And then you could have both been scared together, instead of him sitting in that kitchen for six weeks thinking his son thought he was useless.”
Randy flinched like I had hit him. I had not meant it that way, but I did not take it back, either. It was true, and he needed to hear it.
I stood up.
“Harvest is probably the second week of October,” I said. “Orville’s combining. Dad’s hauling. You could come.”
He lay back down on the creeper and rolled under the pickup.
The truck
The red truck had not run since the winter before. It sat in the machine shed with a flat tire on the right front and a mouse nest in the air cleaner.
In September, Hollis and Dad got it going. Hollis bought a new battery and Dad cleaned the carburetor at his workbench with his good hand and his bad hand, slowly, the plate in his wrist aching in the cold mornings. They aired up the tires, changed the oil, and greased everything that would take grease.
The first time it turned over, Dad let it idle in the yard for ten minutes just to listen to it. Blue smoke, then gray, then nothing. He sat in the cab with both hands on the big steering wheel and his eyes closed.
“Your mother used to ride with me to town in this,” he said when I came out. “Every load. She said it was the only time she could get me to sit still long enough to talk.”
He raised the hoist and lowered it twice, checking it. He climbed up on the running board and looked at the box. He did not climb into it.
I noticed that. So did Hollis.
“He’s not going in the box,” Hollis said to me quietly when Dad had gone in the house. “He knows.”