The Second Sign on Our Farm

Four Screws

I had told myself I’d say something first, a few words about who the women were.

But when I got to the truck my throat closed up, and I knew if I tried to talk I’d cry in front of the whole road.

So I didn’t say anything. I just pulled the moving blanket off Barb’s sign, and lifted the stepladder out, and carried them both to the post.

I had Hilda’s 1931 book tucked under my arm. I hadn’t planned that.

I’d picked it up off the seat without thinking, and it felt wrong to put it down. It felt like she ought to be there.

The talking stopped. I could hear the cottonwoods by the creek and somebody’s dog barking a mile off. I could hear the gravel under my own boots.

I set up the ladder. I climbed two steps. I held the sign against the post right under Dale’s, and I took the first brass screw out of my shirt pocket, and my hand was shaking so badly that I dropped it.

It hit the gravel and disappeared. Nobody moved to help me. I don’t think anybody knew whether they should.

I got another screw out of my pocket. I held it on the drill bit with my thumb and pressed the trigger and drove it in.

Then the second. Then the third. The fourth one went in crooked, and I left it.

Matt didn’t come help me. I had asked him not to. He went and stood beside his father instead, close, so their shoulders almost touched.

That was the right place for him to be, and I loved him for knowing it.

When I climbed down, I didn’t look at Dale. I folded the ladder and stood back next to Emma, and I held Hilda’s book against my chest with both arms.

Lloyd from the county paper already had his camera up. He took a picture of Dale’s sign alone, the way he had planned to.

Then he stepped back two paces, and he took one of both signs together.

Then Old Marlene Baker said, in her loud church voice, to nobody in particular, “I remember Ida Kroll bringing her own truck to the elevator in forty-two. Those men at the scale didn’t know where to look.”

A few people laughed, softly. Someone said Evelyn’s name. Someone else said, “Well, good,” in the quiet way people in our county say things they mean.

Dale stood very still, caught off guard, and looked at those three names for a long time. Then, slowly, he smiled. He didn’t look at me. He didn’t look at anybody.