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COUNTRY THINGS / Todd Lieber IT WAS THE THIRD WEEK in July, nine days after my thirteenth birthday. My older brother, CaI, and I were walking beans, the temperature up around ninety and humidity just as high, the afternoon sun sharp as a welding torch. I came out of the field and saw our neighbor, Ken Harbison, in his pickup. I figured he wanted CaI, so I waved and started the next row. "Arrow," he said, "come here." My name's Aaron, but people call me "Arrow" because I'm built like one. Ken had a thermos of water and gave me a drink. He's not that old—fifty, maybe—but he's got arthritis pretty bad and has a habit of rubbing his hands together and staring at them, which he was doing. I looked past him down the rows we'd done, at the thick, dark beans and the sun-baked dirt stretching to our yard. In the shade of oaks and black walnuts, with the white rail fence around it, our house looked like a little oasis in the heat. CaI came out of the field. "I swear," he said, "if the wind don't blow the plants around so you can't tell burrs from beans, the sweat rolls in your eyes and you can't see shit anyway." He raised his shirt to wipe his face, and the muscles across his chest rippled and shone like corrugated steel. "Boys," Ken said, "you're needed at home." Well, it could have been any number of things. But I couldn't think which one of them would make his hands shake the way they did on the wheel. He could barely steer us over the culvert. "I've known you boys since you were born, haven't I," he said. "Your dad and me grew up together." "What happened?" CaI said. "Knowed him all his life," Ken said. Mom ran down the front steps when we pulled in the driveway and threw an arm around each of us. She'd been with the gilts in the farrowing house, and she smelled like pig and had dried afterbirth and iodine stains on her hands. She wasn't crying, but she had been. Nobody knew what happened. Dad had been hauling big bales home and somehow the tractor wheel must have slipped off the road when he turned onto the highway. Someone passing had seen the tractor and bale trailer in the ditch and found him underneath. "Where is he?" CaI said. He was at one of the doctor's offices in town. The Missouri Review · 19 "Which one?" Cal said "Don't you know?" We were standing in the kitchen, Mom with her back to the sink, where the dishes from dinner were soaking. She'd had her hair under a kerchief, like she always did when she worked, but now she'd taken the kerchief off and was twisting it. "How the hell can you not know?" So he made her say it. "He isn't alive, CaI." She tried to pull us to her again, and I let her hug me, but CaI wouldn't. He banged his fist on the table and the lid jumped off the sugar bowl. He opened a cupboard and slammed it shut. The phone rang and he picked it up. "What!" he shouted. He listened to whoever it was for a minute, then handed the phone to Mom and went down the hall to the bathroom. After that the phone kept ringing until Mom unplugged it, and one neighbor after another, it seemed like, pulled in the driveway. CaI stayed in the bathroom a long time, and when he came out he'd washed and combed his hair. Maud Crutchfield was there then, holding a covered dish in each arm, and CaI got out Mom's folding bridge table and took the dishes from her. He stared at me. "Quit it," he said. "Get out of that corner and be some help." But I couldn't. The kitchen felt like a hundred and twenty degrees, and something was rising and rising in my throat, like it would choke me if...

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