The Call I Made to My Brother First

“I think so, Dad.”

“Good.” He closed his eyes again. “Then the both of you hush and sit with me. I’m going to sleep.”

And he did. He went to sleep with one hand on Bert’s arm and one hand on mine, and we sat there on either side of him, and neither of us moved for two hours.

Bert paid me back the six hundred that afternoon, in cash, folded in an envelope with no note in it. I put it back in the Christmas jar when I got home.

He did one more thing I did not ask him to do. He drove to the tire shop where Percy had dropped my car. He took two new valve cores out of his own pocket and put them in my tires himself with his own tool, and aired them up, and drove my car back to the hospital and parked it in the front row.

Otis got home Tuesday night. He hugged me in the driveway for about a full minute without saying anything, which is how Otis talks.

Dad came home nine days after the surgery. The bleed has not come back. Dr. Ellison saw him at six weeks and said he was a tough old bird, and Dad said, “That’s what my wife used to say,” and they both laughed.

Marty Pruitt fed those cows every single morning until Dad could get out there again. When I tried to pay him, he looked at me like I had insulted his mother. So I made him a pecan pie instead, and Bert brought him a bag of mineral from the store, and he took both.

In the middle of November, on a bright cold Saturday, Bert and I weaned Dad’s calves together in the lot behind the barn, with Dad sitting on the tailgate of his truck in a lawn chair giving orders.

Bert worked the gate. I worked the alley. We have not worked cattle side by side since we were teenagers, and we fell right back into it like we had never stopped, the way you remember how to ride a bike.

At the end of the day we sat on the tailgate next to Dad’s lawn chair with our boots muddy and our hands cold. The calves were bawling in the pen, and their mamas were bawling back over the fence.

Bert reached into his coat pocket and took out his key ring. He worked something off of it with his thumbnail and held it out to me.

It was the little brass valve core tool. The one Dad gave him when he turned sixteen.

“I don’t want it on there anymore,” he said.

I looked at it in his palm, and then I looked at Dad, and Dad was watching the two of us and pretending he was not.

“Keep it,” I said. “You’ll need it someday when you get stuck in the creek bottom.”

“I won’t use it like that again.”

“I know you won’t. That’s why you should keep it.”

He looked at it for a long time. Then he put it back on his key ring and put the keys in his pocket.

Dad cleared his throat. “Don’t lose your caps,” he said, to nobody in particular.

And the three of us sat there on the tailgate while the sun went down over Christy Creek, listening to those calves holler, until it was too cold to sit any longer.