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[49] M y B rOT h e r ’ S h O U S e When i came around back, i found him leaned against the post like a shovel, hands blistered around an amber bottle. he’d been hoeing weeds all day in a garden that long ago had gone back to God—Sure did make a mess of it, he said. We walked out to the skiff buried under long whiskers of grass near the pond. When we were kids we’d stuff our bottom lips with tobacco and spit, gaze out into a field and spit away hours as though we were old men, mortgages and busted marriages, guts rotting out with cancer. A snapper’s head broke the surface. i knew his wife had left him—he didn’t have to say. i asked for a beer and he pointed to a cooler next to the house. i grabbed two. Just then, the dobbers started to rise from the ground, whirling like miniature buzzards as a red light folded over us; for a second, everything was all right, almost like we’d been saved. ...

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