The Second Sign on Our Farm

Evelyn’s Year

I knew Evelyn’s handwriting before I opened her books. It was on every recipe card in my kitchen drawer.

Round letters, neat as a church bulletin, with little circles over the i’s when she was in a good mood.

Her books started in 1951, the year she married Harold. Ida had kept them until then, and you could see the handoff.

Ida’s slanted hand on the first page of January, Evelyn’s round hand by February.

I went straight to 1957.

The spring entries were ordinary. Seed, fuel, a new tire for the truck.

Then, in the second week of June, a line in Evelyn’s hand that wasn’t round at all. It was shaky, like she’d written it standing up.

“Harold to hospital, Concordia.”

Below that, for the next four days, nothing. Not one entry.

For a woman who wrote down every egg, four blank days said more than a page of words could have.

Then the entries started again, and they did not stop. Custom cutters hired from Oklahoma, so much an acre. Fuel for the truck. Bushels hauled, load by load, with the test weight beside each one.

There were fifty-one loads that harvest. Fifty-one entries in her round hand, every one with the date and the bushels and the price.

She was twenty-six years old with a baby not quite a year old.

I knew from the old stories that Harold came home in August and couldn’t use his right hand for the rest of his life.

So everything after that, the fall seeding, the cattle, the bank, was in her handwriting too.

I didn’t read the margins that night. I was too tired, and the flashlight was dying. I just closed the book and held it in my lap a while.

Matt Reads

I carried the 1931, the 1945 and the 1957 books down the attic ladder one at a time, because the rungs are steep and I didn’t trust myself with all three.

Matt was at our kitchen table with a glass of milk when I came in.

I set the books in front of him and didn’t say anything. I just opened Ida’s to May of 1945.

He looked at the page a long time. Then he looked up at me. Then he pulled the lamp closer.

He read until almost midnight. He read every page of all three books, and he didn’t say a single word the whole time. I sat across from him and watched his face.

When he finished the 1957 book, he closed it and laid his hand flat on the cover, the way you’d rest your hand on a dog that was sleeping.

“Grandma never told me any of this,” he said. “Not one bit of it. She told me Grandpa brought in the fifty-seven crop with the neighbors.”

“Maybe she thought that’s what you wanted to hear.”

“Maybe that’s what she wanted to believe,” he said. “I don’t know which.”

I asked him to talk to his father one more time, and Matt shook his head.

“I’ve talked to him twice. If I go a third time he’ll dig in. You know how he is.”

I did know. Dale was the kind of man who would change his mind on his own if you left him room, and never in his life if you pushed.

Matt slid the 1957 book across the table to me. “Order the sign, Tara,” he said. “The one you’re thinking about. Order it.”

“He’ll be hurt.”

“He might,” Matt said. “But those three got left off a long time ago. They have been waiting a hundred years. Somebody ought to say their names out loud.”