Three Old Farmers and a Locked Door
“Roger,” he said, “I’m going to be honest with you. I don’t think I can list this place for you.”
“What? Kent. Today?”
“Not today, and not this year.” He took off his sunglasses. “I sell land here. I’ll be selling land here for twenty more years. I can’t have it said I walked a man into his father’s farmyard the week after the funeral and put a sign up while the neighbors were cutting his dad’s beans. I called the auction outfit from the road and told them to stay home. I’m sorry. I would have wanted you to know before you drove out.”
He got back in his Buick and backed out the way he had come. Roger stood there alone in the yard.
I could have said something. A woman who wanted to hurt him could have said plenty. But I had promised him I would not make it ugly, and I wanted him to see that I had been serious.
The big combine in the field turned at the end of the row and came back toward the yard, and it stopped. Marv Ulrich climbed down out of the cab, slow and big in his bibs, with the dust of the field on him. He walked up to my brother and took off his cap. He did not look angry. He looked tired and old and sorry, the way a man looks who has to tell a boy something about his own father.
“Roger,” he said. “I’d like a minute. Not here. Walk with me to Bruce’s pickup.”
“Marv. This is not the time.”
“I think it is. I’ll be quick.” He looked at me. “Judy, you come too. It’s as much yours to hear.”
Dad’s pickup was a faded blue 1996 Ford, and it had been parked by the field edge under the big cottonwood since the week he took to the bed in the front room, with his thermos still on the dash. I had not moved it. The seat had Dad’s shape in it, under a quilting-cotton seat cover Mama had sewn the year after he bought the truck.
Marv leaned on the fender and did not look at either of us right away.
“I’m going to break a promise,” he said, “and I want you both to know I know it. Your father said to me and Dewey, twice, ‘Don’t tell Roger where it came from. He needs to think he did it himself.’ I kept that for thirty-two years. I’m done keeping it. A man shouldn’t be allowed to stand in his daddy’s yard with a padlock on account of a story that isn’t true.”
Roger said nothing. His jaw was tight.
“You believe your father never gave you anything,” Marv said. “You told Bruce that at Easter. I was in the next room. You said you built everything you had on your own, and that Judy got the easy life, staying home.”
“I did build it on my own.”