“I’m off to Agate,” I tell Pop as I take my plate to the sink and toss half my sandwich. “I want to get the engine looked at before the big snow.”
He nods. He must know my main goal is to spend the day far from our neighbors. I took no punches last night, but today I feel beat up. Pop looks beat up, too.
“No more trouble today, okay?” he says as if to lighten the mood.
“I didn’t start any trouble, Pop.”
“All I’m trying to say. . . .” He inhales in a way that lets me know he is editing his words. “There’s no sense in getting your reputation tangled up with Robert Golden. That’s what you’re not understanding.”
So that’s the real problem. He’s worried about my popularity. He knows that anyone Robert interacts with is marked by the town. And I’m marked in so many ways already. The worry is always the same, that I’m odd and ought to hide the fact as best I can.
I clutch the keys in my fist and swallow my fury into the dark of my belly. I don’t say good-bye.
The sky is gray and full, blizzard season ever nearer. It’s not until I unlock my van that I notice the cigarette butts stubbed out beside it. I remember my neighbors’ taunting faces, how certain they were of their own truth. My hand shakes so much I can hardly open the door or latch my seat belt. I have something to say. I just can’t find the words.
After several tries, the engine starts. As I drive past the Pipeline, the man who punched Robert last night stands with the unemployed, hoping for work today. He lifts his head and watches me go by.
The stones are hot in my belly, clattering over the pitted roads.
I am grateful for the smooth highway, a chance to speed away. The plains have faded to the palest beige, the sky dotted with small flakes. Elk cross the hillside in heavy coats, and I slow to watch a bull, pale except for the dark brown of his powerful neck and head. He lifts his stately horns to sniff at the sky, and even through the closed window, I hear his great, high-pitched bugling.
When I approach the old rodeo stands, I see a man in black sitting alone under the swirling snow. It could only be Robert. If I thought about it more, I’d talk myself out of stopping. But—what can I do?—I’ve already turned into the dirt parking lot.
I’m slow to get out of the van, trying to think up excuses for how I behaved.
“I thought that was you,” I say, walking across patches of snow toward the old wooden risers. “I’m sorry about our coffee.”
He doesn’t speak but raises a flask my way.
His hair blows about in the dust and flurries. One eye opens smaller than the other, and a bluish bruise stretches along his jaw.
“You’re welcome to join me if you’d like to spend some quality time with a drunk,” he says.
I climb into the stands. The wooden plank bows underneath my boots.
“I’m taking a break from town,” he says and gives a tight, unhappy grin.
“I’m sorry,” I try again.
“So is my mother,” he says. “So much for coming here to make her last days easier.”
I’ve stopped a few rows below. He angles his head toward the ample space beside him while shrugging a shoulder as if to say, I don’t know why you’d want to sit here, but the seat’s free.
And so I climb higher. I’ve missed him. When I listen to my instincts and not the town’s, this is what I hear. I sit down, and we both look out at the rodeo ring. He passes the flask, and I touch my mouth to the place where his has just been.
“How is Doris?” I ask. “Minus the shock of seeing you like this?”
A sweet sting of warmth travels down my throat while Robert takes a long breath, as if considering whether he wants to answer.
“Everything about my mother is quiet now, the way she walks around in socks and whispers like she’s in a library.” He reaches for the flask. “Our time together can feel, I don’t know, formal, like she’s trying to entertain a stranger. We sit on the sofa she’s had all my life with stains from a Coke my brother spilled and muddy paw prints from a dog we owned decades ago. We sit, making polite conversation about nothing at all. Most days it doesn’t get to me.”
“I saw her at the window beside her easel the other day,” I say. “She was painting a clown.”
“Weary Willie,” he says. “The hobo clown. She paints that one a lot, and a dancing dog in a sweater. There are only so many kits.” He shields his eyes as dust blows toward us. “My mother is, to me, what she is to you, to everyone in town—the woman in the window, but you can’t quite see in, and she doesn’t notice that you’re on the street watching.”
“Is it the medication she’s taking?” I ask.
He shakes his head.
“This is a woman who can only be so happy,” he says. “I did this to her.”
For a long time it’s absolutely quiet except for the wind and some very distant mooing.
“I still remember her clearing our cereal bowls as Eddie and I left the house that morning,” he says, looking out beyond the rodeo ring. “She was so excited that we were working together for the summer, as if it proved we’d become close.”
And he tells the story of the grain elevator but leaves out the details I know from the game. He talks, instead, about the darkness, the dusty air, the iron gears, and the smell of mildew and creosote. He remembers how their voices echoed inside and the whisper of grain beneath their boots until they turned the knobs and pulled the levers that made the whole place chug and quake like some giant washing machine filled with towels. He describes the narrow stairwells, vibrating ladders, and tiny wooden hatchways leading to wooden bins. You could take a manlift, pulling hand over hand on a rope, all the way to the top of the tower, where you’d walk through a dark passage, narrow as the width of your shoulders. Turn one more corner, and you could stand in a blast of light and wind at that top window, swaying above the town like you were sitting on a cloud.
“It would have been a normal day for my mother,” he says. “She was always in motion, washing the breakfast dishes, wiping spills from the table, snipping beans in the garden, drying slices of fruit in the oven, walking the dog along the rims. You almost never saw her sit. She liked tending to us and the house, like our comfort and pleasure was her reward.”
“What went wrong?” I ask.
I expect to hear the story of the boy kicking lazily at the grain, impatient for his shift to end. But the story he remembers moves at a much faster speed.
“The boss stormed up the stairs, asking why the grain had stopped flowing,” he says. “I’d tied my harness to a ladder and was already out on the grain, but Eddie was shouting about what a weakling I was. He jumped through the hatch straightaway because he just had to show me how to do it right.”
This is where most of the game takes place. But within seconds, Robert felt a huge pull from above and pressure on all the harness straps.
“There wasn’t time to understand what was happening,” he says. “I was hanging halfway down the bin. Eddie must have stepped where there was a pocket of air because he just disappeared.”
Robert flailed, helplessly, legs dangling as if in a swing, while grain funneled toward the base. He tried to grab hold of anything he could use to climb back up to the hatchway so he could unstrap himself and run down to find his brother, but his arms felt like jelly.
“I shouted Eddie’s name. I shouted the names of anyone I thought could help,” he says. “My legs tingled, and there was ringing in my ears. But after a while, I heard blades cutting through our storage bin. I figured, since no one came to help me, it was because they thought they could save him.”
I see his embarrassment that he would have had such blind hope. We all read about these kinds of accidents in the paper. No one ever survives.
“I hung there for a long time,” he says. “My voice was hoarse. I kicked and pedaled my legs to keep them from going numb. I hadn’t shouted or said a word for some time because I understood then that I was being, I don’t know, punished, I guess.”
“How did you get down?” I ask.
“Someone dragged me up from the bin and through the hatchway, and I landed hard on the floor.”
“Who was it?”
“My boss.”
“Mr. Purvis.”
He nods.
“When I looked up at his face, he said, ‘You killed him. I suppose you know you killed him, and here you are crying all this time for yourself.’”
“I’m so sorry,” I say.
“I walked down the stairs, shaky and drenched in sweat. When I was outside, I didn’t even turn my head to look for Eddie. Didn’t feel I deserved to look. I just walked home.”
“No one spoke to you as you were leaving?” I ask.
“Oh, someone did,” he says. “I walked outside in a bloodstained T-shirt, walking funny because the harness had cut off the circulation to my legs for so long. Doctor Fischer stood near the opening.”
“The Wall of Heroes,” I say.
“He shook his head and said, ‘Look what you’ve done, you sissy.’”
Sissy, sissy, look what you’ve done. This is what we chanted during the game as the one playing Eddie spun down to the ground with his tongue out to the side. This is what we chanted as we pulled Dead Eddie from the grain, plucking pretend kernels from his face, gouging our nails into flesh if we could.
“When I got home,” Robert says, “my mother was at our dining room table with her head down. She didn’t greet me. I sat next to her and neither of us made a noise. Sound returned to our house with my father, slamming things and telling my mother how she better not defend me or he’d absolutely go off. I didn’t say a word or even look up. When your brother’s dead and everyone thinks it’s your fault, the last thing you’re going to say is that you might need a doctor.”
“Where were you hurt?” I ask.
Robert lifts his shirt, his skin becoming goose pimpled, to show thick scars where the straps had cut across his chest. The wounds disappear behind the fabric again as he slips his shirt back down.
“You can’t really blame my dad,” he says. “We both know it was my fault, what happened that day.”
“Your brother could have put on his harness,” I say.
“And I could have reminded him. Or shouted for him not to come out on the grain.”
“You were kids,” I say.
“I know when he stepped out on that grain, it was to put me down. But it’s also true that he needed my help and I didn’t exactly try. We were both jerks to each other in our last moment together. It’s something I have to live with.”
Robert screws the cap on and then off again. I pull my arms around my legs to keep from touching him.
“When I see it in my mind,” he says, “when I see it slowed down, I have a chance to reach out for him, but I’m too angry.”
I’ve seen my father do this same thing. He thinks of all the things he could have done the day my mother died to make it turn out differently.
“Every time I sit with my ma,” he says, “it’s still there—what I’ve done. The quiet house, my mother hardly my mother anymore.”
We’ve passed the flask back and forth too many times to keep track. As he speaks, our knees almost touching, I hear what he doesn’t actually put into words. That he believes the things they say about him. Fourteen-year-old Robert—and not poor supervision or child labor violations or even bad luck—is what killed Eddie and stripped this town of its grain elevator and its train.
“Want to hear something funny?” he asks.
“What?”
“When you didn’t make it for coffee yesterday, I sat at a table and watched how much the simple act of me eating a meal there upset the regulars,” he says. “I admit it, I ate as slow as I could and even ordered a second and third cup of coffee, just to make them uncomfortable.”
He laughs so hard that, for a moment, he can’t speak.
“Years ago, when I left here, I had one goal—to become a success as a way to stick it to this town,” he says. “Show them they’d misjudged me. I wanted them to feel small for all they assumed about that kid, who was actually smarter than them and going to do big things with his life. But the truth is, I struggled to get work just like the rest of them. We’re all sitting at our tables hating each other like there’s some big difference between us.”
“I feel so terrible about not showing.”
He laughs again, but this time, just a short ha-ha.
“Serves me right for thinking I was so cool,” he says. “Because, wouldn’t you know, I left my keys there at the diner. Had to go back for them later, like a real jerk.”
We stretch our legs on the lower wooden seats and finish the last drops in the flask.
“When I came here tonight,” Robert says, “I thought I wanted to be alone, but I’m glad it didn’t work out that way.”