“He was here,” I panted, turning in circles. “I saw him. Hallucinations don’t run away from me.”
“You have to ask yourself, Arthur. This false remembering, these dreams—what are they protecting you from? What is it you’re running from?”
“This one wasn’t false, I saw him standing—”
“You’re doing it again.”
“Doing what?”
“You’re avoiding the question. You’re hiding from yourself. You’re using cynicism as a means of forgetting—”
“No, I’m not!” I twisted again, hurling dirt in his direction, and it fell softly to the ground.
Next to where he had just been sitting, ten feet from me, several stalks rustled. I took off after the noise, leaping over low, fallen stalks and throwing my elbows in front of my face to guard it from the assault of leaves. More stalks were moving; someone was in front of me, a trail I could follow, a person shoving their way through the corn.
The sounds of crashing got louder as he moved faster ahead of me. I watched the corn movement take an abrupt turn and I dove to my left to head him off. But the turn was too violent, my movement too sharp, and my feet caught a discarded stalk on the ground, yanked it out from under me. I flew forward, and as I fell, a brown coat appeared out of the mess of stalks and leaves. Without intending to, my body struck its side and we tumbled to the ground, stalks falling with us.
And again, the world was silent.
“Grandpa?” I whispered. Neither of us moved.
In the soft streaks of light that fought their way through the corn, his face appeared for the first time. It was firmly wrinkled, more than it ever had been, the skin having fought five more years of gravity. His hair, full when he’d left, was now gone entirely. His lips were cracked and caked with dirt.
But his eyes were shining like mirrors, just as they always had been.
Tears hit my eyes before I could stop them. I squeezed my face and choked the words out. “Why did, you, why didn’t, anybody, tell me . . . Why are you alive?”
“Arthur.” His voice was higher than I expected.
“Why didn’t you tell me?”
When I opened my eyes, he was blurry in front of me, and the image started to change. It wasn’t his skin. It wasn’t his hair. It wasn’t his voice.
“Tell you what?” He nursed his right arm. “Why are you here?”
I trembled. “You’re not him.” I couldn’t stop staring at him like he was a ghost, even though I now realized he wasn’t. “You’re . . . you’re . . .”
“Henry.” He nodded.
And again, the mirage became real.
4.
MY GREAT-UNCLE HENRY and I barely spoke as I followed him out of the cornfield, across the train tracks, through the melting snow, and toward his rusted pickup truck, parked on a nearby service road.
“You can stay with me,” he’d told me. “I’ve got a couch. Next train’s tomorrow.” I thanked him, and he let the conversation die, turned the dial on the hissing and popping of the AM radio, something about the price of corn and the cold front coming in.
It was unnerving how much he looked like my grandfather, even in his posture. He curled back against the driver’s seat with the same slouch, wide shoulders hunched forward, seeming to permanently occupy it the way that my grandfather had become a part of his living room chair.
Even when my grandpa was alive, my family hardly ever spoke of Henry. I’d never met him. He’d never come out to visit, and the only times anyone brought up going to Nebraska, it was treated as a punishment. Henry himself was only mentioned in passing, in general condemnation of the Midwest: Don’t go to the firing range, Arthur; wouldn’t want you to end up a red-state maniac like your grandpa’s brother, Henry.
But he was a living relic of my grandpa.
“Why haven’t I ever met you before?” I broke our silence as his old, red Chevy bumped and bounced along the gravel. He shrugged but didn’t answer, almost as if the question had been a meaningless pop of the AM radio. “You never came out to visit us or anything.”
The tracks disappeared in the rearview mirror and the whole world became corn, stretching wider in every direction the farther we drove, reaching up over each horizon. If you lived surrounded by this, it would be easy to believe that there was nothing else in the world, like the Earth dropped off into the galaxy once you reached the end of each field. Maybe that’s why people in this part of the country never left.
“Did you ever want to?” I asked, and for a third time, he shrugged, finally mumbling, “It’s a long way.”
“I know,” I said. “It’s just crazy that after all this time, and hearing about you since I was a kid, the only way for me to meet you is to just randomly see . . .” I stopped, remembering how I’d seen him: not randomly, but waiting, standing outside the train—the exact train that I was on. “Wait.”
He shifted in his seat.
“What were you doing at the train?”
“Just waiting.”
“For me?” I asked. He didn’t answer.
“What were you going to do if I didn’t get off the train?” He didn’t answer.
“Did someone tell you I was going to be there?” Again, he didn’t answer, and this time reached for the dial of the radio to drown me out.
“You don’t have to lie to me,” I said, turning it back down. “How did you know that I was going to be on that train? Did my dad tell you? Did he ask you to come get me?”
Henry snorted.
“Answer me!” I almost shouted, and he slammed on the brake. He turned to look at me with his entire frame, shoulders and chest rotating ninety degrees to the passenger seat, and studied me with the same expression. “I haven’t spoken to your damn father in fifteen years. You think I run his errands?”
I felt tiny in front of him. “So . . . you just happened to be there?”
He stared for another moment before turning back to the wheel, back to the road, and pressing the gas once more. “I guess so.”
We didn’t speak again until we arrived at his house.
It was a single-story shack, the roof slanted from left to right, built on a plot of land cut out from the cornfields around it. There was some farm equipment scattered across the lawn, buried in grass so tall, it must not have moved in years. Inside, blue pastel wallpaper was chipping to reveal the plaster behind, and a tweed couch and coffee table were the only fixtures in the living room. Three books were set on the table—the Bible, Birds of Nebraska, and an old copy of A World Away—and a thick stack of Chicago Tribunes sat beneath it. “Mmm,” Henry noised when we got inside, nodding to the kitchen, an invitation to eat. Without another word, he slipped out to the barn.
Clinging to the refrigerator was our family’s most recent Christmas card. I hated them, all of them, a totally meaningless exercise in pretend normalcy. I remembered laughing one year when my grandfather had asked my mother, “Do you think I’ll look less miserable wearing a button-up shirt?” Next to the fridge, a phone was mounted to the wall.
I only knew two numbers—the first that I’d dialed over a hundred times and could plug in without thinking—five five five, one five eight, five six five seven—but the voice on the other end would be Mason’s. And I’d think of all the times that I’d called him and he’d answered and told me the things I needed to hear at the time, and I’d realize how all of those times were bullshit, and how he was using them to get close enough to steal the one thing that was important to me, and I knew that now. I’m sorry, Arthur. Fuck you, Mason.
The other number was Kaitlin’s—five five five, one five eight, three three five three. “You need to be taken care of,” I heard her say. “You need me too much,” and I could see her at the kitchen table, legs crossed toward me, leaning forward to expose enough of her chest to make me think about it. She nodded toward the phone.
“Are you mental?” From across the room came a voice that wasn’t Kaitlin’s; it was Mara, perched coolly on the edge
of the tweed couch, running her hand over my great-uncle’s old radio. Seeing her split my head in pain. She made me want to call Kaitlin more. “Just don’t do something you’ll regret,” Mara warned me.
“You need to be taken care of,” Kaitlin cooed. I looked back out the sink window at my great-uncle, sprinkling food down on the heads of a dozen chickens that ran around him in excitement. I knew chickens didn’t feel any emotional attachment, but watching them scurry around Henry like tiny planets in his orbit, I wondered if he knew something chicken scientists didn’t yet. He wasn’t paying any attention, so I found the old plastic receiver in my right hand, raised it to my ear—
But there was no dial tone. I slammed it back on the base, and Mara and Kaitlin disappeared.
I fixed myself some toast, and as I ate, I pulled open the cupboards. Most were empty, with nothing indicating that my grandpa had ever been here. In the final cupboard, closest to the back door, I found a collection of envelopes, formal-looking letters addressed to Henry Pullman. I thumbed through them. On the top was a letter dated February 1969, from the First Bank of McCook:
Mr. Pullman,
We regret to inform you that, given the last twelve months’ missed payments, your property has entered foreclosure proceedings. The overdue balance of your property mortgage now totals $458.12; please remit this payment to the bank in the next ten (10) business days or we will be forced to . . .
But there were no foreclosure signs, nothing at all to indicate that we were on the property illegally. I wondered if this was from a previous property, or if the bank had forgiven the balance.
I picked up the letter below it, this one from the same bank in October 1974.
Mr. Pullman,
We regret to inform you that, given the last eighteen months’ missed payments, your property has entered foreclosure proceedings. The overdue balance of your property mortgage now totals $865.76; please remit this payment . . .
On like this, the letters continued, telling the story of my great-uncle’s battle with the bank. One from 1977, another from 1980, 1982, 1987, when the bank changed their formatting of foreclosure notices, 1991, 1995, 1999, 2002, a long break before another notice in 2010, and the most recent, a letter from two months ago, indicating that he now owed over $22,000.
I looked back out the window, where he’d moved from chickens to pigs. He sat perched on the fence behind their trough, watching them eat, occasionally slapping one on the side. He smiled at them, and they seemed to smile back, “happier than a pig in shit,” an expression my grandpa had used.
Returning the letters to the cupboard, I wandered to the living room, collapsing on the tweed couch. It was uncomfortable, itchy almost, and the only blanket was a wool quilt about half the length of my body. Still, I wrapped myself up in it and toppled over.
I pulled Birds of Nebraska off the table and thumbed through it, but there were no tanagers in Nebraska, and no signs that my grandpa had ever touched the book.
5.
IT WAS EVENING when I opened my eyes to the clanging of a single pan on the stove. Night had set in over Nebraska and the only light for miles was coming from Henry’s kitchen. Other than that, the house, the yard, the fields, the whole state was going dark.
Finally, my head felt normal; my twenty-four-hour headache had eased and my temples no longer felt like they were slamming together to the cadence of a Kendrick Lamar beat.
When I came around the corner, Henry nodded to the table without speaking. He had set two places, one with his only fork and only plate, overflowing with too many scrambled eggs, eight pieces of toast, and three glasses of milk. I sat, and he brought the pan to the table for himself, drinking from a full gallon. I must have been his first company in years.
“Easy.” He stopped me as I picked up my fork. “No manners in California?”
He bowed his head, cupping his hands and closing his eyes, and, to be polite, just as I always had, I did the same and half shut my eyes, watching as he spoke slowly and directly to God.
“Thank you, Lord God, and Jesus,” he said, his voice softer, almost as if he was nervous to have their audience. “Thank you for the Earth. Which gives me what I need. Thank you for the corn. And for the eggs. For the pigs and chickens, and all their blessings. Thank you for the prairie. Thank you for Nebraska. Thank you for my mom. Hope you’re taking care of her. Thank you for my home. For the sunset in the evening. And for the train in the morning. I live this life for you. Amen.”
I pursed my lips. This was the problem with religion—other than a few animals in a shitty barn and $22,000 in debt, Henry had nothing, but the idea that it was given to him by God made him content to live this muted half existence. My grandfather had always done the same with his illness, reading the Bible and living in accordance with it as though God had given him the divine gift, and not the horrible burden, of memory loss.
We ate in silence. I wanted to ask about my grandpa, about the times he’d stopped here, about his last trip, but Henry didn’t give me a single chance. He never lifted his head from his pan, shoveling eggs from pan to fork to mouth at twice my speed, then washing them away with quick sips from the gallon bottle. When the eggs had dwindled to nothing, he leaned back on his stool, sighed loudly, and spoke before I could.
“Why are you here?” Both of his hands were resting atop his stomach, a small gut protruding below the brown coat that he wore even inside.
It was a surprisingly complicated question. “I’m taking the train route that he used to take,” I decided.
“He?”
I swallowed. “My grandfather? Your brother.”
“Huh.” He used his tongue to clean some loose egg off his teeth and turned to look out the window behind me. His body shifted, but his expression didn’t change. He gave nothing away. Just like my grandpa.
“I was actually wondering—”
“Why you doing that?”
“Why am I . . . retracing his train route? I . . . I guess I’m hoping it might help me to learn more about him. I’m trying to understand more. About his life.”
“Huh.”
“Do you mind . . .” I took a deep breath and decided to test the waters. “Do you mind if I ask you about some places I’ve been? Just to see if you know any more about them?” He didn’t say no, so I continued. “Well, first, I went to Elko, and I met Sue Kopek. Do you know her?” He didn’t react. “And Green River, with Big Ray’s—”
Henry exhaled sharply and loudly again, like the snort of a pig. “Sorry to disappoint,” he said. “Don’t know much ’bout my brother.”
I set my fork down. The way he ignored the questions reminded me of my grandpa as well, except Henry wasn’t battling memory loss.
“He did stay here, didn’t he?” I asked.
“Once. In forty years.”
I knew the answer before I asked, “Five years ago?”
He shrugged.
“But he used to come here more often, right? He used to stop here—”
“That was a long time ago.”
“Every couple of weeks, right, in the sixties, or seventies? He was coming through all the time? Because the place I stopped in Green River said he used to stop every couple of weeks, so I’m assuming his train route was—”
“That was a long time ago.” Henry began to clear the table, an excuse to walk away from me.
“Why did he stop?”
Henry paused at the sink. Night had fallen completely and he was looking at nothing, but I followed his gaze anyway. The barn, the grass, the corn, the prairie, the pigs and chickens and cats, his whole life was out there, but it was invisible in the dark. His face was empty, the flickering light of the stove bouncing off the soft white porcelain of the sink, lighting his features from below, blank and unquestioning, desperately vacant, just like the brother he seemed eager to forget.
I changed course. “What was he . . . like? As a person?”
Again, Henry grunted to deflect the question. “You’d know bet
ter than I would.”
“Not really,” I said, and it surprised Henry. “His disease was pretty bad by the time I was old enough to talk to him. Most of my life, he . . . he wasn’t himself.”
Henry took another long pause, leaning himself against the sink, before asking, “How’d you know that?”
“What?”
“How’d you know that wasn’t himself?” He swayed back up to his full height. “How’d you know that wasn’t just him?”
“Because, I—” I dead-ended, again. “He couldn’t have been. He must have been different. When he was younger? When he had more of his brain? When he wrote the book?”
“Never read the book,” Henry mumbled.
“Me neither.”
“Some family we are.”
It hurt to look across the room at him.
He returned to the table and slouched onto the stool, his entire frame collapsing onto it like sinking into the dirt. It reminded me of the way he’d stood in front of the train that morning, his hands outstretched as if there was no separation between the grass and the soil and the snow and wind and the edges of his skin, like he’d been there so long that he was a part of that world and it was a part of him.
I’d envisioned this moment in my head before, but with my grandpa. Henry spoke as my grandpa, moved as my grandpa, ignored questions the way my grandpa had, stared forward with the same unflinching, unexplainable nothingness as my grandpa, carried on his shoulders the weight of an entire, unexamined life like my grandpa, and yet here in front of me, there was nothing to reconcile them. If they had ever had a life together, Henry had left it behind.
But that didn’t stop me from pushing forward in frustration. “What about when you were growing up? Didn’t you do anything then? What was he like?”
He ignored me.
“Can you at least tell me what he was like? Before the disease?”
Henry didn’t respond and my frustration finally boiled over.
“Jesus Christ! What happened between you two?”
Glacially, he curled upward, sitting at his full height.
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