The Tractor My Brother Paid For

I thought I understood exactly what I had seen. I thought Durward had been bidding for himself, with whatever scraps he had left, and that I had arrived in time to take the last thing from him.

And I thought, God forgive me, that serves him right.

I said the sentence a few minutes later, in front of everybody, with Dad ten yards away in a folding chair.

What I did after

I could tell you I went home that night and felt sick about it. I did not. I felt right.

For about a week I felt righteous in a way that is hard to describe to anyone who has not been wrong that thoroughly.

I would put the tractor back the way it was. I would be the one who honored what Dad built, and my brother could live with the fact that he had let it go.

Dad came to live with Marcy and me that same month. We cleared out the den off the kitchen and put in a hospital bed.

He was eighty-three, and the farm was gone, and he stopped talking. Not all at once. Sentences got shorter, then he stopped starting them.

He sat by the window and watched our backyard, which is a lawn and a bird feeder and a fence. I could see him measuring it against four hundred acres and finding it small.

For the first few months he asked, “Where’s your brother?” in the same voice he used to ask about the weather. I would say, “Busy, Dad.”

I said it kindly. I thought I was sparing him.

Durward called the house. Marcy would hand me the phone and I would say, “He’s resting,” or “Not a good day,” and hand it back.

He drove down twice that winter. The first time I met him on the porch and told him Dad was napping.

The second time I did not open the door. Marcy watched from the kitchen window while he stood on our step with a bag of the butterscotch candies Dad liked.

He set the bag on the railing and left. I threw the candies out. I told myself Dad could not have them for his sugar.

For a year I drove the long way around Kealor so I would not pass his house. I will tell you plainly why.

I was ashamed. After what I said in that lot, a sorry with nothing in my hands felt like an insult, and I told myself I would earn the call first.

That is a coward’s reasoning, and I knew it even then.

I did not feel cruel. That is the horror of it, looking back. I felt like a man guarding a door, protecting my father from the person who had broken his heart.

Every day I kept my brother out, I felt a little more like the loyal son.

Marcy tried. “Fenton,” she said one night in the kitchen, “he’s your brother.” I said, “He’s the reason we’re doing this.”

She said, “No. A wet spring is the reason. He’s the one standing in the yard.”

I told her she did not understand because it was not her family. That one landed.

She put down the dishrag and left the room, and I count it among my debts.

The night

Dad lived two years and four months in our den. In the last month the hospice nurse started coming, a kind heavyset woman named Mavis Durkee who talked to him like he was still the man who ran the place.

She told me one morning in the hall, quietly, “Mr. Marsh, if there’s anyone he wants to see, now’s the time.”