I cut the wire with my pocketknife and unwrapped the rag right there, and I had to get up and walk out to the driveway, because it was money, and I knew whose it was, and I knew exactly what it meant, and it broke something in me that will not ever mend right.
It was cash, banded up, and I did not have to count it to know the amount, because it was half of what our daddy place had sold for. The exact thing Donnie and I fell out over, twenty years back. When our daddy died, the two of us could not agree on selling the old home place, and it turned ugly, the way these things do between brothers, and words got said that neither of us ever took back, and the place got sold and split and we barely spoke again for the rest of his life.
And here was his half. Untouched. Every dollar of it, wrapped in a shop rag and wired up behind his garage refrigerator for twenty years, never spent, never even put in a bank, just hidden away where he would not have to look at it. Because Donnie could not spend it either. The thing we tore our whole brotherhood apart over, he could not bring himself to touch, no more than I could touch mine. It sat in the dark behind his beer fridge being an open wound for twenty years.
There was a note wrapped in with it, and the paper was newer than the wire, like he had written it not long ago and been working himself up to something. I never should have let daddy old house come between me and my own brother. I would give back every dime of this to un-say the things I said to you. I keep meaning to call. I am going to call you. We are two old men and we do not have forever. Come see me, brother. Let us be done with this thing. It was never worth what it cost us.
He never made the call. He was working himself up to it, holding onto that note, meaning to, and his heart quit in his own driveway at fifty-six before he ever dialed the phone. And I never called him either. I was just as stubborn, and just as sorry, and just as sure there would always be time. There was not any time.
I sat down on his garage step a good long while, an old man crying over a rag full of money that neither of us could stand to spend, because it was really just the price of twenty years the two of us threw straight in the river. He wanted to make it right. He said so, in his own hand, to a brother he ran clean out of time to reach.
I took his half over to his kids, and I put my half right in with it, all of it, and I told them it was their daddy and their granddaddy home place come back to them, and that their father and I had been two old fools with it, and they should never be. And I told them the thing I most needed to say and could no longer say to Donnie himself. He loved me. I loved him. We just let a piece of ground cost us the years we should have spent being brothers. Do not do what we did. Nothing in this world is worth what that cost.