The Feed Truck I Drove Home

The ground under that pivot is a silt loam that warms slow. Dad never put a seed in it before the soil was fifty degrees at four inches, at seven in the morning, three days running. He kept a thermometer on a nail in the shop for it. He kept everything else in a green pocket notebook: planter settings, seed population, which nozzle package was on the pivot, how the well was pumping, which tower liked to stick.

The soil hit fifty the last week of April.

Butch Sedlacek, who farms the section east of Dad’s, had his planter rolling on the twenty-eighth. I know because I filled his dry spreader that week. He climbed down while I was running the auger and stood next to the tender with his thumbs in his bib pockets.

Butch is seventy-three. He and Dad shared a fence for forty-six years and argued across it for all forty-six.

“Anybody in your dad’s fields?” he asked.

“Not that I’ve seen.”

“You going to be?”

“Haven’t been asked.”

Butch looked at me. He has a way of looking that feels like being weighed at the elevator.

“Two of a kind,” he said. “No. Three of a kind. Him and the both of you.” He spat. “It’s a wonder anything ever got said in that house.”

The first of May came. Then the fifth. I drove the tender past the home place twice a day on the county road, and both fields sat there in last year’s stalks with nothing moving in them but blackbirds.

The phone did not ring.

On the ninth of May it rained two inches. On the twelfth, a Tuesday, I came over the hill with eight tons of dry fertilizer behind me and there was a sixteen-row planter in the pivot quarter behind a tractor I did not know, with a pickup and a seed trailer at the end rows carrying Kansas plates.

Three days after two inches of rain, on that ground.

I slowed down. I could see the shine in the tracks behind the planter where the wheels were smearing instead of crumbling. I could see mud packing on the gauge wheels. They were mudding it in. Any man raised on that quarter could have told them to wait until Friday.

I could have turned in the lane. I had my hand on the blinker.

Then I thought: he hired them. He looked for somebody to plant our father’s ground, and he looked right past me to Kansas.

I took my hand off the blinker and drove on to the Rasmussen place and unloaded.

I am not proud of that. I am telling it because it is what I did.

That night I didn’t eat. Theresa found me out in the feed truck, sitting in the dark with the door open.

“They put it in wet,” I said.

“Can it be fixed?”

“Some. Not by them.”

She stood on the running board and put her arm around my neck, and we stayed like that with the yard light buzzing.

“He would hate it,” she said. “Your dad. Not the corn. You two.”

“He’s the one that did it, Theresa.”

“I know he is. I still think he’d hate it.”

By the middle of June that field told the whole story to anybody who drove past, and in our country everybody drives past.