My father, Otho Bragg, taught me to drive on a gravel lane behind our barn in a 1962 Ford F-100 the color of a robin’s egg, and fifty-four years later that same truck was still parked in the same barn, and I was the one who kept the battery charged and the mice out of the seat springs. I am Hollis Bragg. I am sixty-six years old. I have lived on the home place outside Judah, Kentucky since I moved back twenty-two years ago to help my mother through her cancer, and after she passed I just never left, because somebody had to keep an eye on Dad, and that somebody was always going to be me. My brother Delmar left for Louisville the week he turned eighteen and came back maybe four times a year, usually for a holiday meal and a photograph, and everybody in Barlow County still calls him “the successful one,” which tells you most of what you need to know about how our family sorts its children.
Our mother, Nadene, used to say Delmar and I were raised in the same house but not the same family, and it took me most of my life to understand what she meant by that. Delmar was the baby by six years, the one who came along after two miscarriages our mother never talked about, and by the time he was old enough to remember anything, my father had gone soft in a way he had never been with me. I was the one who got handed a hay hook at nine years old and told to make myself useful. Delmar was the one who got handed a fishing pole and told to go have fun, on account of his asthma, which was real, but which somehow never kept him from playing football three seasons running. I do not say any of this to complain about my childhood, because I have made my peace with most of it. I say it because it explains why, when Delmar stood in a kitchen forty years later and told me the farm and the truck were always going to be his, some small stubborn part of me almost believed him before I caught myself, because that had been the shape of things our whole lives.
What happened next changed everything… FULL STORY on the next page.
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