Chris Offutt - The Good Brother

“Lord love a duck,” she said. “Look what the dogs drug in. Will miracles never stop?”

She stood straight and rubbed her lower back.

“You know, Virge, sometimes I’d rather sort cats than hunker in the dirt all day.”

“Best wear welding gloves for that chore.”

“They’s some to cut the claws off a cat. Did you know it?”

“It’s untelling what people will do to an animal.”

“I’ve seen them treated better than kids.”

“How’s yours?”

“Susie wants to wear lipstick and Jeannie wants to play basketball. Them boys fight bad as roosters.”

“Ary a one here?”

“They’re in the holler somewhere.”

Sara walked primly between the farrows to the porch. She settled into a metal glider with rust spots showing through white paint. Virgil sat in a chair he recognized from his mother’s house. It fit the contours of his body like an old coat.

“Wondered what happened to this chair,” he said.

“You came around more, you’d know.”

“That’s sort of why I came by today.”

“I kindly had the idea you had something to announce.” Sara’s grin was sly. “I know you.”

“Do you, Sara? I don’t feel like the person everybody thinks I am.”

“Abigail knows you good enough.”

The glider creaked in a steady rhythm that reminded him of bed-springs while making love. One side of the hollow was in shadow. By morning, there would be frost on the dark side of the hill.

“Turning off cold overnight,” he said.

“Reckon you came to talk about weather.”

“Look, Sara, I know I don’t visit enough to suit you. And I got no excuse for it. I envy what you and Marlon have. This is a good place for you all, a peaceful pocket,”

“You could have it, too, little brother.”

“Maybe, maybe not. That ain’t what I’m here over, either. The thing I’m trying to say, what I want you to know. It’s just that. Well.”

He suddenly recognized the safety of living in a hollow, the security of flanking hills with one route in. There could be no surprises here. Everything came at you straight on. You gave up sunlight but you were shielded from rain, wind, and ambush.

“I know we didn’t always get along, Sara. And I know you think I never liked Marlon, but that’s not true. I wish. I hope. Well, what I’m trying to say. Sara, I’m glad you’re my sister.”

“I love you, Virgil. You’re a good brother.”

Virgil wished everything could be that simple for him. He was unable to say those words, let alone reduce the complexities of family to such acceptance. What he was planning had everything to do with family but nothing to do with love. He stood. He wished she would stand so he could hug her. He faltered slightly as if tired. He wanted to leave before the kids arrived.

“You tell Marlon what I said. Hug your babies for me. Keep them warm. Tell them the truth about me, hear.”

“Why, Virgie, the way you talk, anybody’d think you were fixing to elope on us.”

He opened his mouth to speak, but closed it.

“You don’t have to tell me nothing,” Sara said.

“Keep in mind you said that,” he said. “Don’t you ever forget what you just said.”

The glider swayed. As he walked away he knew that he’d never be here again, a thought that was a bludgeon. He backed the car in a half-circle, honked twice, and headed out of the hollow. He wanted to memorize every piece of it, the old fence post covered with vine, a willow that dangled its fronds in the creek. He reached The Road, grateful not to have encountered Marlon or the kids on his way out. Bobcat Hollow stretched toward darkness in his rearview mirror, just another dirt road that followed a creek into the hills. It was behind him now and always would be.

He sat on his trailer steps and listened to the sounds of evening in the woods, the rustle of animals, the call of owl and bobwhite. A strip of scarlet lined the horizon. He was perceiving the world with greater appreciation, like someone who’d nearly died. He lay awake a long time, running through his plans.

In the morning he drove to work for the last time. At the end of the shift, the sound of the time clock hitting his card was a familiar comfort. He lifted the card and dropped it in the hole again. He punched the clock several times until someone yelled behind him, and Virgil placed his card in the rack and joined the flow of men moving down the hall, through the door, and into the sunshine. His car sat between white stripes with the others in the lot. He belonged.

He stopped walking and the men moved around him like water parting for a snag. The old ones plodded to their cars while the young men flicked one another’s caps to the ground. The air held an autumn snap. The sky was crisp and clean. This was the time to lay in wood for winter and turn the earth with fall plowing. It was the season to hunt.

He waited for Rundell by his car. The two of them leaned against the hood.

“I know I ain’t been much good here lately,” Virgil said.

“You work.”

“It ain’t like it was.”

“Live long enough, Virge, you find out nothing ever is.”

“You’re a good man, Rundell. Best boss I ever had.”

Rundell was quiet.

“I’ve learned a lot off you.”

Rundell nodded.

“I’m fixing to make some changes, Rundell.”

“Change is good for a man.”

“I don’t see no way around it.”

“You won’t be so alone either,” Rundell said. “Best thing about it for me was kids. Now I got grandbabies.”

“That ain’t exactly it.”

“I ain’t saying she’s pregnant.”

“You don’t understand, Rundell.”

“Work buddies see each other different from family and regular friends.”

“Maybe so.”

“You’re a good man, Virge. You ain’t afraid of work and you ain’t mean. Ever what’s eating at you will go away. Just start eating it back.”

“Might be that don’t do no good.”

“Then go on a diet.”

Rundell laughed, the lines of his face etched hard but gentle. Virgil reached in his pocket for a small knife.

“Here,” he said.

“That’s your knife.”

“No it ain’t, it’s yours. No sense in me walking around with another man’s knife in my pocket. Take it, now. Go on and take it.”

Rundell accepted the knife. He opened the Made, spat on his forearm, and shaved a patch of hair to test its sharpness.

“Good steel,” he said.

Virgil walked quickly away and drove out of the lot. He was giving away all his goals at once — his father’s cabin, a life with Abigail, becoming a crew boss. There was little to life but work and family, and he was throwing them over the hill. He cut down a side street and parked beside Abigail’s car. Virgil climbed the stairs to her apartment door and she let him in.

“Hidy,” she said. “I thought you died in a wreck.”

“Ab.”

He stepped into the room, slightly dismayed as always by the furniture. Abigail had received a touch of sophistication in Ohio, and every surface was made of chipboard covered by woodgrain vinyl that glowed with a perpetual shine.

“Sit down, Virgil. You look peaked.”

“I’m all right.”

She brought him a bottle of Ale 8, Kentucky’s native soft drink, with a distribution limited to one end of the county. The dark green bottle chilled his hand. He took many small sips because he didn’t know what to say. He admired her chin.

“You looking at my chin again?” she said.

“Reckon.”

“That’s why I put up with you, Virgil. You’re the only man to think it makes me special.”

“When we were kids, you were pretty much all chin.”

“And you were one solid cowlick.”