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.