The Second Sign on Our Farm

The Stories Everybody Knew

Every family has the stories that get told at funerals and wedding dinners. The Krolls had theirs, and I’d heard them so many times I could have told them myself.

There was the one about Hilda and the cream. In the dirty thirties, when wheat went for twenty-five cents and the dust came in so thick they hung wet sheets over the windows, Hilda kept twelve milk cows and sold the cream.

People said the cream check was the only money that came onto the place for three years.

People said that, and then they laughed, and then they moved on to the next story, which was usually about Otto.

There was the one about Ida in the war. Walter died of his heart in the winter of 1941, and Harold enlisted in the Army the next fall, and that left Ida alone on three hundred and twenty acres.

The story went that she drove the grain truck to the elevator herself and the men at the scale didn’t know what to do about it. That one always got a laugh too.

And there was the one about Evelyn and the harvest of 1957, the year Harold had his stroke. She was twenty-six with a baby on her hip and a husband in the hospital in Concordia.

Somehow the wheat got cut. Nobody ever said how. When I asked once, Dale said the neighbors pitched in, and that was the end of it.

They were good stories. But they were told like weather, like something that happened to the farm, not something the women did.

The men in the Kroll stories made decisions. The women in the Kroll stories got through.

And a story isn’t proof. I knew if I went back to Dale with stories, he’d say what everybody says about family stories. They grow in the telling.

The Trunk in the Attic

The big house has an attic you reach by a pull-down ladder in the upstairs hall. Dale doesn’t climb it anymore because of his knees, so it’s been mostly mine since Evelyn passed in 2019.

I went up on a Tuesday night after supper, while Dale was watching the Royals lose and Matt was doing chores.

It was the second week of August and it had been a hundred and two that afternoon.

The thermometer nailed to the rafter said ninety-one. I had a flashlight in my teeth and a box fan I couldn’t plug in because the attic outlet has never worked.

I moved the Christmas boxes first. Then the box of Matt’s baby clothes Evelyn had saved, and the broken spinning wheel nobody would throw away, and a stack of Capper’s Weekly from the sixties.

Behind all of it, under the eave, was a steamer trunk with a brass latch gone green. I’d seen it before. I’d always assumed it held quilts.

It didn’t. It held account books. Forty-one of them, stacked in four rows, with brown leather covers gone so soft from handling they felt like felt under my fingers.

Each one had a year written on the spine in ink. The oldest said 1926. The newest said 1966. I sat down on the attic floor with my back against a rafter and opened the first one.

I’ll never forget the smell. Dust and old paper and something sweet, like dried apples.