Harry Hawk

Every Sunday evening, my father hooked an old iron bed frame to the back of his John Deere and dragged our gravel driveway smooth. Every Sunday he turned the tractor around about twenty feet short of the county road and left that last stretch alone, rutted and full of crabgrass. I found out why he did it when I was sixteen. I'd just gotten my license, and the rough patch kicked rocks up at my bumper. I took a garden rake down there one afternoon, and Dad came across the yard fast. "Leave that part," he said. He took the rake out of my hand. Not hard, but he didn't give me a chance to argue. "It's ugly, Dad." "You smooth it, you can't hear anybody coming." "Who's anybody?" "Anybody," he said, and he went back to the tractor. I told my friends my dad was weird about gravel, and I never thought about it again for eighteen years. He died this past April, and he was 71. In June I finally started clearing out the barn. It was mostly what you'd expect: coffee cans of screws, a broken chainsaw, a pile of feed sacks. But up in the loft, behind the hay bales we'd stopped using, there was a camping cot with a wool blanket folded at the end. There was a small kerosene heater next to it, and a milk crate full of paperbacks. The paperbacks were all used, Louis L'Amour and some Stephen King, a few with the library discard stamp from the school in Mt. Vernon. Inside the cover of one, in a boy's handwriting, was *Cole Brandt.* On the next page, in smaller letters: *Property of the barn.* I'd grown up in that house, and I'd never heard that name. I found a Cole Brandt on Facebook who lived in Tennessee, worked as a lineman, and was about my age. I wrote him three sentences and almost didn't send it. He answered the next morning, and then he called that night...