Thirty-seven years is a strange length of time to live with a ghost who shares your nose. For most of that stretch, I didn’t think about Randall unless Christmas rolled around and the thick manila envelope from our sister Clara arrived in the rural delivery box. Clara always tucked in two separate prints, never the same one, so I would pull out Randall standing beside some cedar tree in Klamath Falls with his graying hair pulled back in a ponytail, or Randall leaning against the rusted fender of an old Ford pickup that looked just like the one our father drove into the ditch back in the seventies.
I would prop his picture up on the corner of the kitchen sideboard for about three days, right next to the salt shaker, and then I would slide it into the back of the pine cutlery drawer where the rubber bands and the spare keys went to die. That was our relationship. A postcard once every twelve months and a silence you could measure in mortgage rates and bad harvests.
The farm sale did it, of course, because money has a way of making brothers forget that they used to sleep in the same double bed and listen to the mice scratching behind the lath and plaster during Kansas northers. In the fall of 1989, right after the ground had frozen hard enough to tear the treads off a tractor tire, we sat in Mr. Henderson’s second-floor office above the hardware store and said the kinds of things that permanently close doors.
Randall wanted to keep the eighty acres of bottomland, swore up and down that we could rotate soybeans and run a few head of dry cows through the winter and make enough to pay off the bank before the spring thaw. I had three kids under ten, a wife who had been coughing for six months, and a line of credit at the implement dealer that was about to turn into a sheriff’s auction notice. I needed cash. I needed every last nickel the dirt was worth, and when Randall wouldn’t sign the release without a fight, I told him he cared more about dead dirt than living kin. He looked at me across that scarred oak desk, his jaw working like he was chewing on gravel, and told me I was dead to him. He didn’t raise his voice. He just stood up, left his winter gloves on the radiator, and walked down the wooden stairs without looking back.
I stayed in the county for another ten years before the debt finally chased me out to the western edge of the state, but even after the move, the distance between Randall and me stayed fixed at two hundred miles and thirty-seven years of stubborn pride. I told myself I was the sensible one, the one who had kept the family from total ruin by forcing the sale, but every time I passed a tractor moving slow on a two-lane blacktop, a little knot would form right behind my breastbone. You get old without noticing how you are doing it. Your hair turns the color of zinc siding, your knees start to pop when you get out of the Barcalounger before six in the morning, and you start taking three different kinds of little white pills with your morning coffee just to keep your blood from getting too thick. I figured Randall was doing the same thing somewhere out west, probably bitter as an unpeeled persimmon, sitting on a porch and waiting to die just to spite me.
Then my local doctor, a young fellow with ears like teacups who kept checking his wristwatch during my exams, found a skip in my rhythm that he didn’t like the sound of. He told me I needed a specialist at the regional heart center over in Coluta, two hundred miles east, right across the river where the hills start to flatten out into the bottoms. I drove over on a Tuesday morning in my old Buick, the engine ticking like a dry clock, the sky the color of a wet slate roof. The highway was mostly trucks hauling anhydrous ammonia tanks and flatbeds loaded with scrap iron, the kind of scenery that makes you feel like you are driving through the back of your own mind. When I got to Coluta, the clinic was one of those low brick buildings they put up in the seventies with tinted glass that always looks greasy and a parking lot striped with faded yellow paint that nobody ever bothers to touch up.
The waiting room inside smelled like floor wax and old magazines that had been handled by ten thousand sick people. It was one of those places where nobody looks at anybody else, everyone staring hard at their own shoes or pretending to read brochures about cholesterol and low-salt diets. I checked in at the high laminate desk with a woman who had a pencil stuck through her bun and a cardigan with buttons shaped like acorns, took my little pink ticket with the number forty-two on it, and sat down on a orange vinyl chair that hissed every time somebody shifted their weight. I had my clinic paperwork folded twice in my jacket pocket, right next to my billfold and a crumpled tube of peppermints. I was sitting there watching the second hand on the wall clock jump in nervous little jerks when the double doors at the end of the hall swung open and a man laughed.
It wasn’t just any laugh. It was the specific, gravelly bark our grandfather had used when someone dropped a calf or missed a gate latch, that low double-hiccup that could clear a room of solemn preachers in two seconds flat. My head came up before I even knew I was moving. My neck gave a sharp, dry crack that made me wince, and I stood up so fast my boots slipped an inch on the linoleum. Down at the reception desk, thirty feet away through a maze of plastic ferns and end tables with stacked Reader’s Digests, a man in a faded canvas jacket was leaning over the counter talking to the nurse with the acorn buttons. He had his back to me, but he had Randall’s broad, stooped shoulders, the same slight lean to the left that came from twenty years of carrying heavy grease guns, and the thick silver hair that grew wild around his ears because he still refused to pay a barber more than eight dollars.
I didn’t think. I just started walking down that narrow aisle between the chairs, my boots making a heavy, flat sound against the floor. The woman in the chair beside me pulled her canvas bag into her lap as I passed, thinking I was headed for the water fountain or the washroom, but I didn’t stop until I was standing right behind his right shoulder. He smelled like woodsmoke and old wool, exactly like our father’s closet used to smell after a day of cutting hedge posts down by the creek. He was holding a pink intake ticket in one hand and a blue medical folder in the other, and the top sheet of his papers was covered in the same sharp, angular handwriting that used to win blue ribbons at the county fair penmanship contest back in fifty-six. He was halfway through spelling out our mother’s maiden name for the receptionist when I cleared my throat, and the sound came out like a dry leaf scraping across concrete.
Randall didn’t jump. He just stopped talking, his pencil poised a quarter-inch above the intake form, and slowly turned his head to look at me over his shoulder. His face was browner than mine, mapped deep with those fine, sun-baked wrinkles that come from looking into thirty-seven years of western horizons, and his eyes were still that pale, watery blue that could look right through you when you were trying to lie about chores. He looked me up and down once, taking in the cheap windbreaker I’d bought at the farm store in Emporia and the way my hands were trembling slightly against the edge of the counter. The receptionist stopped her typing, her fingers hovering over the keys like she could smell the lightning in the air between us. Randall didn’t yell. He didn’t drop his papers or turn his back or tell me to go to hell, which is what I half-expected him to do after all those Christmases of silence and the bitter ink of our last afternoon in Mr. Henderson’s office.
Instead, he looked down at my pink ticket, then at his own, and gave that same dry, double-hiccup chuckle that had made me stand up in the first place. “Well,” he said, and his voice was lower than it used to be, like an old engine that needed its valves ground down. “If I’d known you were coming all this way just to steal my parking spot, Earl, I would’ve told Clara to send two sets of pictures.”
The nurse behind the counter looked between us, her pencil still stuck in her hair, waiting to see if she needed to hit the buzzer under the desk for the security guard who usually sat by the vending machines. I stood there with my mouth half-open, my tongue feeling thick and useless behind my teeth, because thirty-seven years of rehearsed speeches about the farm sale and the price of bottomland and who owed what to whom suddenly vanished like morning fog off a stock pond. I couldn’t find a single sharp word in my whole head. The only thing I could feel was the peculiar, heavy thump of my own heart doing that same ragged skip that had brought me two hundred miles from my kitchen table. Randall turned back to the counter, finished spelling out our mother’s name with three precise strokes of his ballpoint pen, and slid the paper across the laminate. Then he turned back to me, hitched up his trousers by the belt loops, and didn’t offer a hand, but he didn’t walk away either.
They called his name first, about twenty minutes later, while we were sitting on opposite ends of the same orange vinyl bench without saying a word to each other. He went through the double doors into the back hall with his blue folder tucked under his arm like he was carrying a ledger to the grain elevator. I sat there watching the second hand on the clock make another four complete circles, listening to the hum of the Coca-Cola machine in the corner and the muffled sound of a doctor’s voice coming through the partition wall. When my turn came ten minutes after him, Dr. Vance didn’t look like much of a cardiologist, she looked more like a schoolteacher who spent her weekends grading spelling tests, but she had a quiet, no-nonsense way of looking at her little light-box that made you feel like she could see every grease stain on your liver. She pointed to a fuzzy white smudge on the lower edge of my heart valve that looked like a thumbprint on a dirty window.
“You’ve got some mild calcification here, Mr. Miller,” she said, tapping the film with the rubber eraser end of her pencil. “Nothing that hasn’t been coming on for ten or fifteen years, but your rhythm is throwing a fit because you’re running yourself ragged over something. High blood pressure, bad sleep, too much salt in the diet. You folks have a family history of this sort of thing?”
I told her about our father. I told her how he had dropped dead behind the corn crib on a Tuesday morning in November when he was sixty-eight years old, just three months after the bank threatened to foreclose on the south forty. Dr. Vance didn’t say anything for a long minute, just nodded slowly and wrote something down on her yellow pad with a fountain pen that scratched against the paper. “Well,” she said, without looking up. “Your brother is in the next exam room down the hall with Dr. Henderson, and he’s looking at almost the exact same picture. Genetics are stubborn things, Mr. Miller. They don’t care much about who kept the land or who sold it.”
When we came out into the hallway at the same time, the waiting room had thinned out until there was only an old woman with a cane and a young mother trying to keep a toddler from eating a magazine. Randall was standing by the water fountain, waiting for the little paper cup to fill up, his shoulders rounded under the canvas jacket. He looked tired, the kind of tired that sleep doesn’t touch, the deep bone-weariness that comes from living alone in a small house where the only sound is the refrigerator cycling on and off every twenty minutes. I walked over and stood by the second fountain, and for a long time neither of us made a sound as the water trickled down into the drain.
“You still smoking those little Dutch Masters?” he asked, not looking at me, just staring down into the white porcelain bowl.
“Quit five years ago,” I said, rubbing the back of my neck where the skin was loose and dry. “Doctor said if I didn’t, my lungs would turn to soot by the time I was seventy.”
“Smart,” he said, turning off the tap with a sharp click of the chrome handle. “I quit when the tobacco got too high. Taste like burning hay anyway now.”
We walked out to the parking lot together because our cars happened to be parked four spaces apart in the gravel strip by the dumpster. The wind had picked up from the north, bringing the smell of river mud and dead cornstalks across the flat blacktop, and my old Buick looked even smaller and rustier beside Randall’s clean Ford than it had in my driveway. We stood there by our respective doors for a minute, neither of us touching the handles, the gray gravel crunching under our boot heels every time we shifted our weight. The sun was trying to break through a bank of low clouds over the grain elevator across the highway, throwing a watery, pale light across the hoods of the cars.
“Clara still sends those pictures,” I said, looking down at the ground where a scrap of yellow grease-crayon paper was stuck in the weeds.
Randall let out a short, dry breath that turned into a little puff of white vapor in the cold air. “Every year. Last Christmas she sent one of me standing by my woodshed. I looked like an old owl that had fallen out of a dead elm.”
“She sent me one of you with a big dog,” I said. “Looked like a good dog.”
“He’s a fool of a dog,” Randall said, but his mouth twitched at the corner. “Chases jackrabbits until his paws bleed and then expects me to drive him home in the cab like he’s the hired man.”
He reached into his pocket, pulled out his car keys on a brass ring with a worn leather fob from the implement dealer in our old hometown, and gave them a little spin before closing his fist around them. He looked across the roof of my Buick at the open highway running south toward the river, then back at me, his pale eyes steady and clear in the thin afternoon light.
“I’ve got some coffee back at the motel room,” he said, and his voice sounded almost like it used to sound back when we were clearing brush by the creek before the world went sideways. “It’s not much, and the pot tastes like tin, but it’s better than the stuff in that clinic waiting room.”
I looked down at my own keys, then over at the two hundred miles of blacktop that stretched between Coluta and my empty kitchen table in the western hills. My chest gave another one of those little dry hitches, but it didn’t feel like panic anymore; it just felt like the engine finally catching after three cranks on a cold morning.
“What kind of coffee?” I asked.
Randall opened his car door, the hinges groaning in the wind, and looked back over his shoulder with that same half-grin I hadn’t seen since the summer we built the hayloft together. “Chock full o’ Nuts,” he said. “The kind Dad used to drink until it gave him the acid reflux.”
I walked around the front of my Buick, my boots grinding into the gravel, and climbed into the passenger seat of his truck without looking back to see if my car would start or not. We didn’t talk about the farm sale, and we didn’t talk about Mr. Henderson’s office, and we didn’t mention the thirty-seven years of silence that had sat between us like a frozen ditch. As we pulled out of the clinic lot and headed down toward the diner by the highway, Randall reached over and turned on the radio, finding a station that was playing old country music from back when our parents were still young enough to dance in the kitchen on Saturday nights.
