The Tractor My Brother Paid For

I said, “There isn’t.”

She looked at me one second longer than was polite. Then she went back in and fixed his pillow.

Dad asked once more. It was a Tuesday, the third week of March, and he had slept most of the day.

He opened his eyes at about four in the afternoon and said, plain and clear, as if he had been saving the strength for it, “Where’s Durward?”

I said, “I’ll call him, Dad.”

I did not call him.

I told myself there was time. At nine that night there was a knock at the front door, and my brother was on the porch in his barn coat with his collar turned up, thinner than I had seen him.

Mavis, I found out later, had called the Co-op, where he drove a grain truck, and left a message. He had come straight from the scale house. He still had chaff on his sleeve.

“Fen,” he said. “Is he”

“He’s asleep.”

“I won’t wake him. I just want to sit.”

I stood in the doorway, one hand on the frame, and for the second time in my life I made the same choice. I said, “Not tonight, Durward. You can come to the funeral like everyone else.”

He did not argue. He nodded once, turned up his collar, and walked down our steps and across the yard in the dark.

I stood there and watched his taillights go around the corner and felt, God help me, like the stronger man.

Dad died at ten past four the next morning. Marcy and I were with him, and Mavis.

His breath got slower and then there was a space where the next one should have been, and then there was only the clock. I held his hand and said, “I’m here, Dad.”

And I was. But the one person he asked for was not, and I was the reason.

The funeral

Durward came to the service at the Kealor Methodist church. He sat in the very last pew with Lorene, in the same brown suit he had worn to our mother’s funeral eleven years earlier.

He did not come up to the casket. He did not come to the graveside.

When I got to the church basement for the lunch, the ham and the scalloped potatoes, one of the church ladies told me quietly that he had left his casserole dish on the counter and not stayed to eat.

The dish was a blue Pyrex with his wife’s name on masking tape on the bottom. I carried it out to my car, and it sat on a shelf in my garage for four years.

Pride feels like backbone at first. Then it turns into a wall you build a house against, and you cannot remember when you stopped being able to see out the windows.

The shop

The tractor had come home with me the day of the sale, on a rented flatbed. It sat in the back of my pole barn for three years and five months under a tarp.

Every time I went in for a pair of pliers, there it was, the faded red and the dent in the left rear fender. I would get what I needed and leave.

Three weeks after the funeral, at the dinner table, Marcy said something I have never forgotten.

She said, “Your father asked you to do one thing at the end that you could do.” I said, “What?”