Twenty Three Marks on the Barn Wall

So he stayed. He took some of the checks, which meant Kyler and I each got a whole four hours of sleep in a row for the first time in a week. I did not know a person could be that grateful for four hours.

On Sunday a lady from church left a nine by thirteen pan of scalloped potatoes and ham on the camper step, still warm, wrapped in a towel. There was a note under the foil that said only, “Praying for Lane. Return the pan whenever.”

We ate the whole thing standing up at the tailgate. Kyler bowed his head before he started, without anybody asking him to, and said the short grace his grandma used to say at our table. I had not heard it in years.

That is the way it is out here. Nobody makes a speech. Somebody just leaves a pan.

Nobody asked us for a dime. Not Virgil, not Orvil’s dad, not the church. The only person in that whole county who had put a price on helping that boy lived right across the road.

Boyd knew it, too. The county is not that big. People talk at the sale barn and the post office and after church, and by the end of the first week everybody had heard about the fifty dollars.

I did not tell anybody. I did not have to. Kyler had told Orvil, and Orvil had told his dad, and that was the end of it being private.

I will be honest. Part of me was glad. And part of me felt sorry for Boyd, because I know what it is to have a whole town look at you sideways, and I would not wish it on my worst enemy.

Boyd was not my worst enemy. He was my father’s brother. He taught me to drive a stick shift in that same county road when I was twelve.

I kept thinking about that. Lane came home on the Tuesday of the second week.

Delia drove him up from Kearney in the car with the seat laid back as far as it would go. He could not sit a pickup yet. He could not do much of anything yet but lie still and be mad about it.

He was on a walker the first day, and then the physical therapist said he could try crutches for short distances, and nobody on earth was going to stop him trying.

“Don’t you dare go out to that lot,” Delia told him.

“I won’t,” he said. He did, of course. On Thursday.

It was a sunny afternoon, warmer than it had been, and the snow was going off the hills in a hurry. We had a heifer in the headcatch with a big calf coming normal, just slow.

Kyler did that one by himself. I stood back by the gate on purpose. He washed up and checked her and set the chains with the double loop and pulled when she pushed and rested when she rested.

I happened to look up toward the house, and there was Lane.

He was standing at the corner of the lot fence on his crutches, in his old brown barn coat with the pockets torn. He had come the whole way across the yard on those things, which must have taken him a quarter of an hour.