The Feed Truck I Drove Home

Phil read that part again. His chin shook, once, and he got hold of it.

“He told you that you were the best help he ever had.”

“On a yellow tablet. Under a log chain.”

My brother laughed, and it broke in the middle, and I laughed too, and then neither of us was laughing. We sat in our father’s feed truck with his gloves on the dash, two gray-headed men, and we did the crying we had not done at the funeral.

Nobody saw it but a sparrow.

After a while Phil wiped his face on his sleeve and set the seed corn cap carefully on the dash, next to the gloves.

“Show me what I’m looking at,” he said.

We walked the pivot quarter for two hours. I dug up plants with my knife and showed him the roots running flat along the wall of the trench instead of down. I showed him the waterhemp and told him it was still small enough to kill. I opened the green notebook to the page for the panel fault, and it was there in Dad’s printing with the date, 2017, and the words “safety switch tower 5, clean and reset.” We aired up the flat with the compressor on Dad’s pickup. I cleaned the switch with a wire brush and Phil threw the lever.

That pivot groaned and shuddered and started to walk.

Phil stood and watched water come down on that poor crooked corn like it was the first rain he ever saw.

Then we went back to the yard and let the tailgate down on Dad’s pickup and sat on it, which is where every piece of business on that place had been settled since before either of us was born.

“I don’t want to sell it,” Phil said. “I thought I did. I’ve been out here every weekend since March and I don’t.”

“You can’t keep it. Not with that payment. He’s right about that.”

“What would you do?”

“I’d do just what he said I’d do. I’d keep it and it’d bury me.”

Phil took the pencil out of his shirt pocket. He turned Dad’s envelope over to the blank side.

“Butch Sedlacek told me Thursday he asked Dad twice for the east eighty.”

“He’s wanted it since I was in high school.”

“What’s dryland worth out here?”

“Laying against a man who wants it? Five thousand an acre.”

He wrote it down. Eighty times five thousand. Four hundred thousand dollars. Under it he wrote three hundred eighty-eight, and he drew a line.

We both looked at what was under the line.

“That clears the bank,” Phil said slowly. “All of it. With the eighty. Only the eighty.”

“Dad wouldn’t sell it.”

“Dad isn’t the one with the pencil.” He said it gently. “Grandpa bought that eighty with hog money to make the place bigger. I think he’d let it go to keep the home quarter. I think he’d call that a trade.”

I thought of all the times I had driven the disk down that east eighty. It is good ground, but it is not the home quarter, and it is not the creek.

“That leaves the pivot and the grass,” I said. “Free and clear.”

“In both our names. Half and half, the way I had it written.” He tapped the pencil. “You farm it. All of it, your way. Your cows go back on the creek. You pay me a fair rent on my half, and I’ll put my rent back into the place until the machinery’s caught up.”