Write a fabulous story.
He sits there in bed with his wife, her reading a novel, him with his glasses off, not seeing just thinking.
“What the hell else am I supposed to do?” he says into the shadows on the ceiling.
“There’s nothing else you can do.”
“You mean I’ve done enough. I’ve interfered enough.”
“No, I mean, some people just don’t want to be helped,” she says, closing her book and setting it down on the nightstand. She sets her glasses on the book and turns toward him and puts her hand on his forearm and pets the hair there.
“Jesus Christ, Judy, he’s my brother.”
“It doesn’t matter who he is, Steve, he doesn’t want your help. You can’t help people like that. Go to sleep. It’s late.”
She turns off the lamp but he stays there sitting up.
He knew this was coming. Their dad had had trouble with cigarettes, went on a oxygen tank when he was younger than Fred. He quit then but he wasn’t in very good shape. All those dirty kleenexes. That oxygen tank made him give it up but not Fred. Fact is he smoked more after he quit farming. His town job that’s all he did—smoke and drink coffee and drive around, talking bullshit.
What do you do when your brother, who also happens to be your best friend, who you know better than anyone in the world, won’t listen to you?
The day he knew there was trouble was the day he was supposed to meet him for lunch at Taco Town. His choice. In the entire time they had been brothers they had never missed each other for anything. They’d been late, sure, but never just didn’t show up.
He checked the office and he wasn’t there so he went out to the farm—a clear, false spring day, geese in vees in the sky, cows on the cornstalks. He found him inside, half asleep with poker on, barely awake even after he’d called through the house.
Fred sat up and pushed the blanket off. He was too sick to look surprised. His face looked gray and his eye was all red and bloodshot like he’d been scratching at it.
“Just go ahead and let yourself in,” he said with a cough.
He sat down on the loveseat and looked from his brother to the muted television.
“I wanted to see if I could get you to weld something for me. I don’t have the right equipment.”
“You never have the right equipment. I thought you were bringing me lunch.”
“Nope. I ate enough for both of us. Snooze you lose.”
They watched the TV.
“Must be nice to have the day off,” Fred said. “Must be nice to have the entire winter off.”
“All right. That’s enough. You don’t want to tell me what’s going on, I don’t have to know.”
“You’re right. You don’t.”
“I still need that hitch welded.”
“I’m sure you do.”
He went out and got in his truck. Snow in the barrow pits and in the field rows along the highway but their yard was dry. After he put his truck away in the shed he went in and put on his coverall and then went back out and split wood with the hydraulic splitter. The wood cracked and popped until he had enough for a week. He hauled it to the side door with the wheelbarrow and stacked it. He put the wheelbarrow next to the shed and went in through the side door, hauling in armfuls of logs until he had built a good pile next to the fireplace. The work winded him and his knees hurt. He stuffed newspapers under the kindling and lit it and then sat down in his chair and waited for his wife to come home.
A little after dark she came with two bags of groceries and as she began to prepare dinner he went into the kitchen.
“I need you to call Suzanne and see if you can find out what’s going on with Fred.”
“OK. Why?”
“He’s all messed up. I think he might have had a stroke or something.”
“Oh my gosh. OK, I’ll do it after we eat.”
He went back down to the fire and rested until dinner was ready. She called him up then and they ate baked chicken, potato salad, steamed carrots, and creamed corn. They drank Kool-Aid. They watched the news on a small TV on an antique desk. Dessert was canned peaches.
She did the dishes and then he could hear her talking on the phone. She laughed for a few minutes then she was quiet, murmuring, then she hung up. He waited until he heard her footsteps coming toward the den before he turned the TV down.
“Well?” he said.
“She said he’s not doing that great. She said the doctor’s put him on nicotine patches and inhalers but nothing’s worked yet.”
“Because he doesn’t want to quit.”
“She said he coughs through the night. She said he’s lost about 30 pounds. She sounded really worried.”
“Did she tell you if he’s had a stroke?”
“No. She wouldn’t talk about that.”
“I know he has. Something’s happened to him. I know it. He’s not like he used to be.”
“Well, you would know better than anyone else.”
“No, Suzanne knows. She’s living with him. She’s protecting him.”
“You’re probably right.”
She went back into the kitchen then to paint her nails.
The next day he called his two nephews and asked them what they thought. They both seemed concerned but not surprised. They both promised to call their dad and to visit soon. They asked him what he thought they should do. He said he thought Fred was dying.
Two weeks passed then and it was getting time to work the fields for planting, to disk and plow, the spring wind on its way, the geese almost all gone from the sky. He drove over to Fred’s on a Sunday afternoon, hoping to catch him in the shop or out in the yard. He pulled in front of the steel shed and turned off his truck. The sliding doors were open in the middle just enough for a man to get through. He couldn’t see any light or hear anything from inside. Just as he was about to get out of the truck Fred came out of the shed, wiping his hands on a white rag. He didn’t look at the truck or at his brother.
He rolled down his window.
“Hope you’re getting practiced up to weld that hitch for me,” he said.
Fred didn’t slow down or say anything. He just kept walking back to the house and wiping his hands with that white rag.
