“He told you that you were the best help he ever had.”
“On a yellow tablet. Under a log chain.”
My brother laughed. It broke right in the middle.
And I laughed too. And then neither one of us was laughing.
We sat there in our father’s feed truck, with his gloves on the dash. Two gray-headed men. And we did the crying we hadn’t done at his funeral.
Nobody saw it but a sparrow.
After a while, Phil wiped his face on his sleeve.
He set the seed corn cap carefully up on the dash. Right next to the gloves.
“Show me what I’m looking at,” he said.
We walked the pivot quarter for two hours.
I dug up plants with my pocketknife and showed him the roots running sideways along the wall of the seed trench, instead of down where they belonged. I showed him the waterhemp, and told him it was still small enough to kill if we moved fast.
