The Last Pan Off Bonanza Creek

The Thing I Did Not Do

I want to tell you what I did next, because it is the part I am proudest of, and it is a small thing.

I did not say anything to Rand. Not one word. I had said everything I had to say to him at his trailer, and he had told me to go home.

I did not look around at the yard. I did not look at Lorna or at Hap.

I just stood at that counter with my hands flat on the wood and waited for Duncan to finish his paperwork.

It was Eli who spoke. He stood up from the bench and walked over and stood beside his uncle, close, the two of them the same height now, which I had not noticed before.

“Dad would have helped you,” Eli said. His voice shook a little, but he kept going.

“If you’d come to him. He told Mom that, in July. I heard him. He’d have given you half.”

Rand closed his eyes.

“You didn’t have to take it,” Eli said. “You just had to ask.”

Rand turned around and walked out through the yard, past every truck, and the men made room for him again the way they had coming in.

Nobody said a hard word to him. Nobody had to. He got in his truck and sat there a long time before he drove away.

Duncan wrote me a check that afternoon for the balance, a little over four hundred and twelve thousand dollars after the advance and the refining.

His hand was steady. Lorna put it in an envelope and held it out to me with both hands.

“Clay always paid his fuel bill on time,” Duncan said. “First of every month, forty years of it, him and his father before him. I figured his family had some credit coming.”

I paid the wash plant note at the bank the next morning, two weeks early.

The loan officer, a young woman who had gone to school with Eli’s cousin, came around her desk and hugged me, which I am fairly sure is not in her job description.

The Recorder’s Office

Rand came to the house on the eleventh of October. It was a clear cold morning, the creek starting to freeze along the edges, the birches mostly bare.

He parked down by the gate and walked up the road on foot, which told me something.

I met him on the porch. I did not ask him in, but I did not ask him to leave either. Eli came out and stood beside me with his coffee.

Rand had a paper in his hand. It was a transfer for his quarter share of the claim, the share their father had left him, filled out in that same blocky hand and not yet signed.

“I’m selling the Hunker machine to a fellow from Sulphur,” he said. He did not look at either of us.

“That covers the sixty Duncan gave me. You’ll have it by Christmas. And I want Eli to have Dad’s quarter. It was never mine. I never put a shovel in that ground.”

“You don’t have to do that,” I said. And I meant it. The money, yes. The quarter, no. That was his father’s gift, and I would not have asked for it.

“I know I don’t,” Rand said. He looked at Eli then. “Your dad would have given me half. You said so. I’m giving you mine. It’s not the same. It’s what I’ve got.”

We drove into Dawson together that afternoon, the three of us in my truck, and he signed it at the mining recorder’s office in front of the clerk while Eli stood at the window. It took ten minutes. Nobody said much.

On the drive home, Rand sat in the back seat and looked out at the hills, and somewhere past the Bonanza turnoff he said, very quietly, “I’m sorry, Wynn. I’m sorry, Eli.”

Eli did not turn around. But he said, “Okay,” and after a minute, “Okay, Uncle Rand,” and I knew that was as much as a seventeen-year-old boy could give him that day, and it was more than some men would.