The Sentence
On Sunday, the sixteenth of August, at about half past one in the afternoon, my youngest brother stood on the new gravel in front of the pavilion I had built and asked me to fix a brass plate. He asked me politely. He said he would pay for it himself. He said it would take a week.
I said the thing that I said. I am going to tell you the whole of it, because I have been told by my wife, Irma, and by my brother Loyd, and by a ninety-one-year-old aunt in a pink cardigan that I am not allowed to dress it up.
I said, “Rosalee gave this family twenty-one years, Gaylen. Twila gave us a check.”
I knew it was cruel before the last word left my mouth. That is the part I would like someone to understand. It was not a slip. A man says a slip and then looks surprised. I looked at my brother’s face and watched it land, and I felt something that I would call satisfaction if I had to put a name to it, and then I walked back to the machine shed so I would not have to see what the satisfaction cost.
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I sat on an upturned five-gallon bucket beside the vise for forty minutes. My name is Verlin Rayburn. I am sixty-eight. I have farmed two hundred and forty acres north of Quillan, Missouri, for fifty years, corn and beans and about three hundred hogs, and I am a man who has never in his life had much to say that was not about weather or prices. Nobody ever had to wonder if I was angry. I would just stop talking. That afternoon I had said more words in one sentence than I had said to Gaylen in a year, and they were the worst ones I had.
I want to tell you why I said it. It is not a good reason. But it is the true one, and it has been waiting thirty-four years to be told, and if I tell you any other reason you will not understand why I came up my brother’s walk with a gray steel box.