The Second Sign on Our Farm

Asking One More Time

I didn’t order it the next morning. I want that understood.

I didn’t want to do this behind Dale’s back, and I didn’t want him finding out at the end of his own lane in front of the neighbors.

So on Thursday I carried all three books across the yard to the big house.

Dale was at the kitchen table doing the crossword in the Salina paper, the way he did every morning after chores.

I set the books down beside his coffee cup.

“Dale,” I said, “would you just look at these? That’s all I’m asking. I found them in the attic. They’re your mother’s and your grandmother’s and your great-grandmother’s.”

He didn’t look at the books. He looked at me over the top of his reading glasses for a long moment. Then he looked back down at his crossword.

“Leave the old books be,” he said. “They’re nobody’s business now.”

“They’re the farm’s business,” I said. “They’re the whole reason there is a farm.”

He filled in a word with his pencil. He didn’t say anything for so long I thought he wasn’t going to answer at all.

“My mother told me the farm was the men’s,” he finally said.

“She told me that when I was small, and she told me that the year before she died. Are you going to tell me my mother didn’t know her own business?”

There was nothing I could say to that. Not without making him choose between his mother’s words and his mother’s handwriting, and I didn’t think that choice was mine to force.

So I told him straight out what I meant to do. “I’m having a second sign made,” I said.

“With their three names. And at the dedication I’d like to hang it under yours.”

He set his pencil down. His face didn’t change at all. “You do what you think you have to,” he said.

I picked up the books and went home. He never opened them. Not that day.

Barb’s Garage

There’s a woman in Mankato named Barb Hanson who paints signs in her garage.

She did the sign for the Legion hall and the one for the Methodist church, and she lettered half the pickup doors in the county.

I drove over on my lunch hour the next day with Dale’s measurements written on the back of a feed receipt.

Barb was at her bench in a sweatshirt with paint on both elbows.

I told her what I wanted. Same white pine, same size, same black letters as the sign Dale ordered in Beloit, so the two would look like they belonged together.

“Three names,” I said, and I wrote them on her pad. Hilda. Ida. Evelyn.

Barb looked at the pad for a while. Then she looked at me. “Kroll women,” she said.

“I remember Evelyn. She judged pies at the fair when I was a girl. Nobody argued with her.”

“No,” I said. “Nobody did.”

“What’s the occasion?”

So I told her. Not the whole thing. Just that Dale’s sign had four men on it, and I’d found the books, and I thought the women ought to be up there too.

Barb didn’t say anything for a minute. She picked up a pencil and started sketching the letters, very carefully, the way she’d have to cut them.

“My mother ran the Hanson place for eleven years after Dad’s tractor rolled,” she said without looking up. “There’s no sign out there with her name on it either.”

She charged me a hundred and forty dollars. I know she undercharged me, because I’ve seen what she gets for the church signs.

When I tried to give her more, she pushed my hand away.

“Just send me a picture of it hanging,” she said.