This morning my brother rowed out to sea.

An hour or so before daybreak, I heard him lift the oars off their storage rack in the garage.

When he left the dinner table last evening, he washed out his coffee mug and placed it in the cupboard. He’d always left it alongside the stove, calling it the “promise of the morning.”

I wasn’t totally surprised.

Jeremiah had begun discussing what had to be repaired around our house before winter set in. The cracked window in the guest bedroom, for instance.

“Who has visited us in years?” I asked.

He didn’t reply.

A clanking noise erupts from our aging pickup when steered sharply to the left. Been that way for half its life. He insisted it had to be fixed.

“Why?”

“Winter’s coming.”

Our mailbox post down by the road listed to one side. “We need to have it straightened.”

What about the dental work he’d been putting off for years? His right eye had scarcely any peripheral vision remaining. Shouldn’t an ophthalmologist check that?

What use is a blind carpenter?

“Our stairway’s top step creaks, Tom.”

Yet we took wry comfort in its speaking to us countless nights and mornings.

“The iron stain in our bathtub. And the toilet that tends to run.”

His preoccupation began in late July. Because such matters never seemed to faze Jeremiah in the past, over time I also had grown mostly indifferent until something truly broke down. It’s how we addressed our health concerns, too. Why be anxious about what might happen? Toilet running, mailbox post slanting earthward, a clanking ’79 Dodge Warlock…our bodies were hardly different, except we continued to rise each sunup and worked full days.

We’d acquired a 38-acre woodlot with an expansive view of the Maine harbor a couple decades earlier. Purchased it for several hundred dollars and a 1955 Chevy flatbed pickup. As the years passed and land became more expensive, that property became the primary source of our nightly conversations. We palavered as if it were a woman one of us was going to wed someday.

Jeremiah’d wax about a timber peg barn he was going to erect behind the house.

The livestock we’d raise. I fantasized about the orchards we’d cultivate and how each summer we’d comb our blueberry bushes and pick raspberries for canning.

Come wintertime, when our Home Comfort wood cookstove glowed ember orange, we’d turn to crafting the interior of our imaginary domain. Wide plank floors and the wainscoting we’d cut and plane in its cellar. We’d display his collection of vintage wood planes like objets d’art above the fieldstone fireplace.

Meanwhile, our four-square nineteenth century farmhouse in a state of disrepair served our Spartan needs admirably well—as did the furnishings we’d picked up over the years at yard sales, including the mismatched chairs and dinnerware at our table. The frugal setting seemed to abet our gussying up that aspiration on Lookout Hill.

Until blue larkspur bordering the roadsides presaged the ending of summer.

As if our romancing had betrayed her.

Jeremiah’s thoughts would wander off when I broached the subject. After so many years we’d mostly worked out what we wanted to occur there. And, given our respective ages, we didn’t have all that amount of time remaining.

At the table one evening last November, Jeremiah remarked at the clip local real estate was being purchased by out-of-staters. He listed several houses that had been sold while citing the exorbitant sums these folks were willing to pay.

“Been true for several years now,” I said, not certain what he was driving at. Several nights later, when he invoked the subject again, I asked point blank, “You aren’t thinking we might sell off some of our Lookout Hill acreage, are you?”

He didn’t answer.

“Well?”

“Not some of it,” he murmured.

I pushed away from the table and stomped outside for a smoke.

We didn’t speak to each other for an entire week. Then a Sunday noon I asked if he wanted to walk the woodlot. We’d stake the corners of the house and barn, site the perennial and vegetables gardens, and decide the species of fruit trees he thought we might want to grow. It was a brisk sunny day with snow glittering like frosting on the ground.

“You go, Tom,” he said.

Over the remaining winter months I vainly sought to breathe life into the Lookout Hill dream that had even materialized in several colored renderings Jeremiah had once painstakingly sketched.

High summer is when he began to point out what was breaking down.

Across from our house we kept a small rowboat on the boulders just out of the ocean’s reach. Jeremiah and I’d take turns tending the few traps we’d set for catching lobsters for our table.

A recent Sunday he rowed out to one of the neighboring unoccupied islands. Through binoculars I watched him drag the dory onto its sandy beach that reflected the morning sun in stark contrast to its bordering dense spruce. Gazing at the horizon line, he sat there until owl light before rowing back to shore. It’s something he might have done as a boy.

“Whaddaya see out there?” I asked.

“Nothing at all,” he replied.

* * *

It was no longer pleasant to sit across from him at the dinner table. Further, I had no interest in discussing, say, wedging the top stair tread. I viewed his niggling projects as some dark expedient for packing provisions, laying out woolen clothes in anticipation of inclement weather, and seeing to it that the leather in one’s high boots was well oiled…preparing for the unknown.

It’s also when I began to fully grasp the extent I’d depended on the Lookout Hill illusion to give me reason to look forward to the days, months, and years ahead. Even if the vision never materialized, it had to be grounded in tangible evidence that it indeed could. Boasting a magnificent vista of Maine’s Stonington harbor and its surrounding islands, the woodlot provided that.

We had reached an impasse.

No longer did either of us inquire whose turn it was to cook. We began fending for ourselves—yet each night sat mutely across from each other.

I soon understood something else about myself.

Our years of planning had facilitated my looking forward. But even more critical was the insight that in addition to the woodlot dream…indispensable was another person with whom I could share it, someone who would entertain it as fully as I.

Without Jeremiah’s participation in its becoming real—Lookout Hill held no power.

Does the relationship die too? I asked myself.

He remained my brother. But now we had what in common?

What was I missing?

One of the last evenings together, as Jeremiah rose from the table, I blurted out. “What about our land?”

With his back to me he didn’t answer.

“Well?”

“It’s yours now, Tom, all 38 acres. Yours to do with it as you wish.”

“The house, the timber-peg barn, our orchards, my perennial garden…all mine?” I cried.

He would not face me.

“The chest of dovetailed drawers and rolltop desk you were going to fabricate from cherry wood harvested from the lot?

“The sconces forged from our small blacksmith shop under the barn…and fitted with lamps throughout our rooms—

“Mine overlooking Isle de Haut. Yours looking back on Deer Isle and the Sedgwick Bridge?

“Are you saying this is all mine now, Jeremiah?”

He had the habit of brushing nonexistent lint off the right side of his trouser pocket when agitated. Now he stood stiff as a granite marker at the door.

“All of it, Tom.”

I uttered a high-pitched laugh.

“Our great expectations were nothing more than wisps of light that have laced our years together? No more real than words like forever, soon, tomorrow, and yesterday?

“Do I now go out and beguile a stranger with the lie that we share affection for each other—when actually all I seek is their help in keeping fucking Eden alive? For without it there is no tomorrow. Is that what you are suggesting, Jeremiah?”

“I am.”

The front door closed softly. I watched him crossing the road to the dory. Moon illumined, he rowed out among our traps. Not a single one did he inspect.

* * *

The guestroom window pane had been replaced and freshly glazed, and the toilet had ceased running by the next morning. I witnessed the rural mailman’s surprise that afternoon when he drove up to discover our mailbox sufficiently upright. Jeremiah had been sitting on the porch steps, placing a new spark plug in the lawn mower and never looked up.

The once leisurely evening meals now were abbreviated drastically.

He was fearful I might question him.

Anxious that any daybreak might be the one in which he would row out to sea, I wrote a brief request, placing it on his bed. We slept across the upstairs hall from each other.

“Since I won’t be listening to your footsteps on the stairs as you climb to bed each night

…given I always turn in earlier than you…I ask that you help me understand.

“A few simple words, Jeremiah.

“Something for me to ponder in your absence.

“For as the mist burns off and the sun illuminates all the returning boats save ours, I know I’ll be looking in vain for you out among the islands.

“Lookout Hill was an earthly paradise…ours.

“And now I get it. When in truth you understood that so much earlier than I.

“As night drifts toward you like a phantom ship, more expansive than you could have ever imagined, even more glorious than our dream—may the days and nights we’ve shared together in that illusion of splendor and hope warm you against the cold brume that precedes it.”

Four or five days elapsed—I’m not sure—when at first light I heard the oars being lifted from their perch once again and watched Jeremiah lope down our front bank through a curtain of rain.

He never acknowledged the note I’d left at the base of his bed.

A scrap of the wall-calendar’s August in his cursory hand lay on our table:

The frayed wire on our washing machine, Tom. Sorry. I didn’t get to it.