The Feed Truck I Drove Home

Log chain. Cables. A coffee can of cotter pins. And back against the cab wall, a zippered bank bag from the State Bank, the kind they give you for deposits.

The notebook was in it. So was an envelope.

It was a plain white envelope with a flag stamp in the corner. It was addressed in my father’s block printing, the printing of a man who learned to write on a slate, to me. My name. Our road. Elba, Nebraska.

It was sealed. He had gotten as far as the stamp.

I sat down on the running board in the sun and opened it with my pocketknife. One sheet off a yellow tablet. It was dated the ninth of November, which was four days before he went in to see Don Jensen.

I am going to set it down the way he wrote it.

“Wade. I am no hand at this so I will say it plain. The place is not clear. I borrowed on it in 2012 for the pivot and again when your mother was sick and again after the water in 2019. It is three hundred eighty-eight thousand dollars. The payment is thirty-eight thousand a year and this place has not made thirty-eight thousand clear in six years. I have been paying the bank with the bank’s money. I never told you boys. I was ashamed.

“If I leave it to you, you will keep it. I know you. You will pay that bank until you are as old as I am and Theresa will do without, same as your mother did, and you will never say a word. I will not do that to you.

“Phil will sell it. He can count, and he does not love it. Do not hold that against him. I made him that way. I told him the summer he was nineteen that he was no farmer and he believed me. He will clear the bank and there will be a good deal left, and he will split it with you fair. I would bet the place on it. I guess I have.

“You get the truck because it is paid for, and it is the only thing out here that is.

“I ought to mail this. I will probably put it in the truck.

“You were the best help a man ever had. I should have said so when it would have done you some good. Dad.”

I read it twice. Then I could not see it to read it a third time.

Twenty-two years. He had never said it. Not at the sale barn when my calves topped the market, not the night we pulled twins in a blizzard, not once. He had written it on a yellow tablet and bought a stamp and then lost his nerve and tucked it under the seat of a truck, with his log chain, where he knew I would get to it sooner or later.

It took me four months because I would not reach across to his side.

Theresa came out to see why I had not left. She found me on the running board with the paper in my hand and my face in a state. I handed it up to her.

She read it standing. When she finished she sat down beside me on that narrow step, hip to hip.

“He knew you,” she said. “He knew just exactly what you’d do.”

“He could have told me.”