And then one of them would up and say the thing he most hated to hear. “It's all right. Don't worry on it.” Like he wasn't supposed to worry or even think. He was like a horse that chewed on the corral. It wasn't something you wanted it to do, but it done it anyway. Soon as your back was turned, it was eating the corral rails again. And the only thing you could do was to kick it. He was that horse. He couldn't stop thinking, because that was his nature, but he knew he wasn't supposed to be doing it.

Once when he was thirteen and Tom was eleven, Tom had come on John while he was working on the wheel bearings of a wagon that had busted down. He was struggling to get the bearing, washer, and castellated nut on when Tom had just come up on him from behind and said, “It don't go that way.”

“What?”

“It don't go that way. You got it ass backward.”

John did the work of a grown man. There was never any thinking that maybe he couldn't do something a man was supposed to do. Tom stayed around the Old Man, helping, watching. That's what Tom did—watched. John worked, Tom watched. Only now he wasn't just watching, he was telling John what to do.

“You want to do it?” John asked, flipping a pair of pliers at Tom.

Tom batted the pliers down. “I don't want to do it. You do it. Only do it right.”

“You ain't the Old Man.”

“No, I ain't. I was the Old Man and I had a kid as dumb and ugly as you, I'd a drowned it in the rain barrel first time I saw it. You don't know how lucky you are.”

What happened next was something of a blur in John's memory, like he had brushed up against something and smudged it. He only knew he had Tom on the ground and was beating on him with his fists, trying to make Tom's face dissolve into the ground.

And when he finally quit beating on Tom because he had already beat all the fight out of his brother, John thought, for a minute or two, he had won. He was the older brother, and he was going to be treated like the older brother. But later, when the Old Man had seen Tom's busted-up face and dragged him over to where John was and pushed Tom forward like the evidence of something that got broke and asked, “What the hell have you little spitwads been up to?” John couldn't answer.

“Nothing,” Tom said.

“Nothing, hell. Your face looks like the bottom of a stall after a good mare fuck.”

“It wasn't nothing. We was just fooling,” Tom said.