The Second Sign on Our Farm

Who I Am in All This

I’m not a Kroll by blood. I grew up in Smith Center, the daughter of a man who sold insurance and a woman who taught second grade, and I didn’t know a heifer from a steer until college.

I met Matt at Kansas State. He was studying agronomy and I was studying to be a vet tech, and the first time he brought me home I stepped in a fresh cow pie in my good flats.

Evelyn, his grandmother, washed my shoe at the yard hydrant with a scrub brush and never said one word about it.

She just handed it back to me clean and asked if I liked rhubarb.

I married Matt nineteen years ago in the Lutheran church in Mankato.

We’ve lived in the second house on the place, the little one, since the week we came home from our honeymoon.

I work four days a week at the vet clinic in town, mostly large animal.

I’ve pulled calves at two in the morning with my arm in a cow up to the shoulder. I’m not delicate.

Dale has always been good to me. I want that clear before I tell the rest.

When our first baby came too early and didn’t live, Dale built her a little cedar box himself, and he cried harder than Matt did.

So this was not a story about a mean old man.

It was a story about a good man who had never once been asked to look at something he’d been told when he was small.

Asking Twice

Matt came in after dark with silage dust in his eyebrows. I told him about the sign while he washed up at the kitchen sink.

He dried his hands slowly. “I saw it last week,” he said. “At the sign man’s shop. I asked him about it then.”

“And?”

“And he said the same thing he said to you.” Matt hung the towel on the oven handle. “He said Mom always told him the farm was the men’s.”

He meant Evelyn. Matt’s mother left when he was nine, and Evelyn raised him in the big house with Dale, so to Matt she was Grandma and Mom both, depending on the day.

“Did she say that?” I asked.

“She did,” Matt said. “I heard her say it. More than once. Somebody would thank her for a meal at harvest and she’d say, oh, the farm’s the men’s, I just feed them.”

I thought about that. I thought about Evelyn at the yard hydrant with my shoe, and how she never took credit for anything in her life, not a pie, not a quilt, not a calf she saved.

“I’ll talk to him again,” Matt said. And he did, two days later, out at the shop while they were changing the oil on the combine.

I wasn’t there, but I saw them through the kitchen window.

Matt talked with his hands. Dale kept his on the oil filter wrench. After a while Matt came back across the yard and shook his head before he even reached the porch.

“He said he’s not changing a sign he already paid for,” Matt told me.

“He said Grandpa Harold would turn over in his grave if he saw women’s names on the lane.”

“Would he?”

Matt sat down on the porch step and was quiet for a long time. “I don’t know,” he finally said.

“I was eight when Grandpa died. I don’t remember him much. I remember his hands shook.”

That was the stroke. I knew about the stroke the way you know about family weather.

Harold had a stroke when he was young, and he got most of himself back, but never his right hand.