The Name on Our Mailbox

April and May

I started planting corn on April 24th at five in the morning. The soil temperature was fifty-one degrees at two inches, which I know because I stuck the probe in by the east line fence three times to be sure.

Our planter is a sixteen-row John Deere, twenty-two years old, pulled by a tractor that is not much younger. I had gone over every row unit in the shed the week before. I replaced six seed disks and one closing wheel that Gary had been meaning to get to since the fall before.

The first round took me forty minutes longer than it should have. I watched the monitor like it was a newborn. When I got to the end of the field and lifted the planter and turned, my hands were shaking so hard I had to stop and drink some coffee out of the thermos lid before I could drop it again.

By the second day I had stopped shaking. By the fourth day I was singing in the cab with the radio off.

Tyler came home every Friday night from Iowa State. He is our only child, 22, in his last year of ag business, and he drove the forty minutes home every weekend that spring and fall without my asking once. He ran the seed tender and kept the planter full so I did not have to climb down.

“Mom,” he said the first Saturday, watching me back the planter up to the tender. “You’re better at this than Dad.”

“Don’t say that.”

“I’m not saying it to be mean. You’re slower on the turns and your rows are straighter.”

My dad, Hal, came out every day that Tyler was gone. He is 80 years old.

He farmed two hundred acres north of town his whole life and quit in 2011, and he still gets up at four-thirty. He could not climb into the cab anymore without help, so he ran the yard. He kept the seed sorted, he answered the phone, and he brought me dinner on the tailgate of his Buick.

“Your mother would have liked to see this,” he said one noon, handing me a ham sandwich wrapped in wax paper.

“Planting?”

“You, planting.” He looked out over the black ground with the corn rows just showing pale in the low sun. “She used to say you were the one who should have had the farm.”

Steve came out twice. Once in May, on a Saturday, to haul two loads of last year’s beans to the elevator in Gary’s semi while I planted soybeans, and once in October. Both days he went home by five for supper. Both days I thanked him, and I meant it.

I finished planting soybeans on May 19th. That night I sat on the back step with my boots still on and called the treatment center and asked for Gary on the family phone line.

“It’s in,” I said. “All of it.”

There was a long quiet on the line.

“All nine hundred?” he said.

“All nine hundred.”

“Deb.” He stopped. I could hear somebody laughing in a room behind him, and a television. “I’m sorry I wasn’t there.”

“You’re where you need to be.”

“Pam says I’m supposed to say what I feel. So I feel proud of you. And I feel like a piece of junk.” He laughed, the short way. “Both.”

“You can feel both,” I said. “Pam’s right.”