The Call I Made to My Brother First

Both back tires were sitting on the rim. I saw it before I even had the key out, the way the back end of my silver sedan sagged down toward the pavement like a tired horse.

It was 7:27 on a Saturday morning at the end of October, and the transfer crew had just pulled out of the hospital lot in Morehead with my father in the back.

Family can’t ride along on a transfer. The nurse told me that at six in the morning, kind and firm, and I told her I understood and that I would be right behind them the whole way.

I knelt beside the back tire in my brown suede jacket. The sky over the hospital was going from black to that thin gray it turns in the hills before the sun clears the ridges, and the entrance behind me was lit up bright and empty.

I ran my thumb over the valve stem. No cap. I pressed the center of it and nothing happened, because there was nothing there to press. The core was gone.

I went around to the other side. Same thing. Two black valve caps were stood up neat on the pavement behind the car, side by side, the way Dad taught us so you never lose them.

That was when I knew. Not guessed. Knew.

I fix road graders and dump trucks for the county road department. I have pulled more valve cores than most people have had hot dinners. A slash looks like a slash. A nail looks like a nail.

Dad put one of those little brass tools on my key ring the year I turned sixteen. He put one on my brother’s key ring the same year Bert turned sixteen, four years before me.

“A truck stuck in the creek bottom will come out on soft tires,” he told us. “Let some air out, crawl her out, air her back up at the store. And don’t lose your caps.”

Bert had left the hospital at six o’clock that morning. He said he needed a shower and a clean shirt, and that Winchester was on the way to Lexington anyway, so he would meet us there.

He kissed Dad on the forehead before he went. I remember that. Dad didn’t know who he was by then, but Bert kissed him anyway, and he did not look at me on his way out.

I stood up and wiped my hands on my jeans and looked at the lit doors of the hospital for a long minute. I did not cry. I want to say that plainly, because people always guess I did.

I was too busy doing the math.

My father is Irv, and he is seventy-six years old, and he has run cattle on the same hundred and twenty acres off Christy Creek since before I was born.

He was feeding Friday evening, alone, like he always does. Forty head of black baldy cows and one old bull who thinks he is still a young one.

Somewhere between the hay ring and the gate he slipped in the mud by the water tank and went down hard. He caught the side of his head on the gate post going down.

Marty Pruitt, who has the farm next to Dad’s, saw his truck sitting in the lot with the door open and the lights on at dark, and he knew that was wrong.