The Debt I Carried for Thirty-Four Years

Thirty-Four Years

I will tell you how a person can carry a thing for thirty-four years.

You carry it in the first year by planning to say something. Thanksgiving, you tell yourself. Christmas. When the hogs sell. I would be across the dinner table from Gaylen and I would think, I will say it after the pie. And then he would laugh at something Dad said, and the whole table would lean toward him, and I could not.

You carry it in the second year by getting angry. You tell yourself he did not have to do it. You tell yourself he was making himself the hero of a thing he had never even had to live in. You remember that he left, and you were the one who stayed, and nobody paid you by the week.

When Dad died on the ninth of March, 2019, I decided I would say it at the funeral. I stood beside Gaylen at the grave, at the cold edge of that hole in the Quillan cemetery, with the wind coming off the bean stubble, and I turned to him, and I opened my mouth, and what I said was, “Thanks for coming.”

He said, “Of course, Verl.”

Dad went into the ground believing the farm had saved itself. I let him. Mother let him. It was the one thing Gaylen had asked for, and between the two of us we kept it.

Mother never mentioned the box again, to me or to anyone, except once. In the fall of 2023, one Thursday when Rosalee was at the sink and Mother was bright, she said out of nowhere, looking at me, “He still doesn’t know that you know.” I said, “No, Mother.” She said, “You tell him.” I said I would.

That was two months before she died. I did not tell him.

When we cleared out her house in March of 2024, Irma found the box behind the flour tin. She did not open it. She set it on the table in front of me and said, “That’s yours to deal with,” and went to see about the quilts. I carried it out to the machine shed and put it on the shelf above the vise, where I could see it from the bucket. It has been there ever since. I have looked at it nearly every day.