The Burn My Father In Law Refused

Wilfred said fine. Then he stopped answering her calls, and now he had come to my mailbox, not hers, to tell me the line would not be burned.

I sat in my truck in the drive for a long time after he left. It would be easy to describe what I felt as anger, and that would be mostly true.

But under the anger was something quieter and more practical, which was arithmetic. I called my husband from the truck.

Justin was on a pipeline welding hitch near Ponca City, Oklahoma, two states of heat and diesel from our kitchen table, nine days from coming home. He answered on the fourth ring, outside somewhere, and I could hear a generator behind him.

I told him all of it. I did not soften it, because he is not a man who needs softening. When I finished, the generator ran for a long time with nobody talking over it.

“He said that? To you?” “In the drive. Just now.”

“I should have seen it coming,” Justin said. His voice was flat and tired. “He has been on me for a year about the place.

About how we should be on that ground, me and you, and Mom’s too old to run it.

I told him to quit. I did not know he would do this.”

“I need to know what you want me to do.” “What do you want to do?”

“I want to burn it, Justin. Our line, Mom’s whole quarter section. I think I can. I grew up burning with Dad.”

“Then light it,” my husband said. “I’ll deal with my dad when I get home. You deal with the grass.”

I have thought since about how much that sentence cost him. He is a good man. He loves his father, who is not a villain in the way the word is used in movies.

Wilfred is a man with a lifetime of belief that land is the only thing that lasts, and that a son should have more of it.

That is not a wicked belief. What he did with it that April was wicked, and I am not going to pretend otherwise just because I know where it came from.

I drove to my mother’s after supper, and she was out at the machine shed in her barn coat, looking at the old green John Deere Gator with the slip-in water tank in the bed.

She had not asked me to come. She had not told me what Wilfred said to her either, but she knew. A mother knows.

“He told you,” she said without turning. “He told me.”

“Katie.” She turned around. In the shed light she looked every one of her sixty-three years, and then she squared her shoulders. “I am not selling it because I am scared.” “I know, Mom.”

“I would sell it tomorrow if somebody offered me a fair price and a good reason. I am not selling it because he thinks I have to. There is a difference.” “I know there is.”

“Your father would burn it,” she said. “With or without Wilfred. Harvey would have burned that line in a snowstorm just to make the point.”

“Then we will burn it,” I said, and she put her hand flat on the cold steel of the water tank, and that was the whole conversation. The rest was logistics.