Preston McGraw

Lenny adjusted the choke on the old John Deere, his knuckles swollen from the humidity. The engine coughed twice before catching, spewing a plume of gray smoke across the gravel drive. He did not look at me while he spoke, his voice competing with the rattle of the manifold. "He is up at the north ridge fixing the wire," Lenny said. "Maggie took the truck into town for feed. You should go up there before the sun gets too high." I wiped the grease from my palms onto my jeans. The denim was stiff, caked with the red clay of a county I had spent a lifetime despising. "He does not want me up there, Lenny." "I am the one paying you," Lenny muttered, swinging a heavy boot over the tractor seat. "Go up there." The walk up the ridge took 20 min through the knee-high fescue. Preston was kneeling in the dirt, a pair of rusted fencing pliers gripped in his right hand. Those hands used to navigate the delicate micro-vasculature of a human heart under the bright, sterile lights of St Andrew. Now they were calloused & stained with tobacco juice. He heard my boots in the grass but did not look up. He looped the barbed wire around the cedar post, straining until the metal groaned. "Your father sent me," I said, stopping five feet back. Preston secured the staple with a single, precise blow of his hammer. The rhythm was the same one he used to use on sternal saws. Methodical. Unforgiving. "Lenny needs to mind his own business," Preston said. He finally looked at me, his eyes squinting against the Kentucky glare. There was no hatred in them, which was the worst part. There was only the flat, empty slate of a man who had simply moved on to the next chore. "The mortgage on the old place is cleared," I said, though he had not asked. "Rita helped me settle the remaining accounts." "Good for Rita." He stood up, wiping his brow with a sleeve that smelled of old sweat & diesel. He looked past me, toward the dust cloud rising from the main road. Maggie’s truck was coming back.