The Second Sign on Our Farm

June of 1957

That morning, before anyone came, I had walked over to the big house and set the 1957 book on the seat of Dale’s pickup.

I didn’t leave a note. I didn’t think it needed one.

Dale turned away from the post. He walked across the gravel to his truck, slow, the way his knees make him walk now.

Forty people watched him go and nobody said a thing.

He opened the driver’s door. He picked up the book and looked at the year on the spine.

Then he sat down sideways on the seat with his boots still on the running board, and he opened it.

I watched him turn the pages. He went to January first, the way a careful man would, and then he stopped himself and turned forward.

I knew where he was going. He was going to June.

He found it. I could tell by the way his shoulders came up. He was reading the line in his mother’s shaking hand. Harold to hospital, Concordia. Then the four blank days.

He read for a long time. People started to drift toward the hay rack and talk low among themselves, the way they do at a graveside when the family needs a minute.

Matt walked over and stood by the pickup, not too close. Emma took my hand. I don’t think she’d held my hand in public since she was eight.

After a while Dale lifted his head and looked at me across the yard, and he motioned me over with two fingers.

Just two fingers, low, the way he’d call a dog he didn’t want to spook.

I went. I still had Hilda’s book in my arms.

He didn’t say anything when I got there. He just turned the book around on his knee so I could see it, and he put his finger on the margin of a page in the middle of July.

Between a load of wheat that tested sixty-one pounds and a fuel bill from the co-op, in pencil, in Evelyn’s round hand with a little circle over the i, were three words.

“Dale’s first tooth.”

I hadn’t seen it. I had been too tired that night in the attic to read the margins.

I stood there by his pickup and read it, and then I had to look at the sky for a while.

“She was hauling wheat,” Dale said. His voice was rough. “Fifty-one loads. Daddy in the hospital. And she stopped to write down my tooth.”

“She did,” I said.

“She told me the neighbors brought that crop in.” He turned the page, and the next, and the next.

Load after load after load. “She told me that my whole life.”

He ran his thumb down the column of numbers the way I had run my thumb down his sign. Slowly. Like he was counting.

“I think she was protecting him,” Dale said after a while.

“Daddy. He could never use that hand again. I think she let him have the harvest, because he had nothing else left to have.”

I hadn’t thought of that. I stood there and thought of it, Evelyn giving her husband the credit for the hardest summer of her life, and saying it for sixty years until even her son believed it.

“The farm’s the men’s,” Dale said. “That’s what she always said. I think she meant she was letting it be.”

What Dale Asked

He closed the book and got out of the pickup.

He walked back across the gravel with it in one hand, and the crowd went quiet again, and he stopped in front of the post.

He looked up at the two signs a long time.

Then he turned around to face the road, and the neighbors, and Lloyd with his camera, and he cleared his throat.

“I left some people out,” he said. “My daughter-in-law fixed it. I want everybody to know that’s how it’s going to stay.”

That was all the speech he made. He’s not a man for speeches.

But Marlene Baker said, “Amen,” and Pastor Mike said, “Amen,” and then half the road said it, and Lloyd took another picture.

Then Dale turned to me, in front of everybody, and asked me something I didn’t expect.

“Would you have your sign lady cut it in cedar?” he said.

“Like the post. Pine won’t last out here. I want it to last as long as mine.” He paused. “I’ll pay for it this time.”

“Barb,” I said. “Her name’s Barb.”

“Barb,” he said. “And would you ask her to put the years on them. All three. Grandma Hilda’s I don’t know. You’ll have to find it.”

“It’s in the front of her first book,” I said. “I’ll find it.”

He nodded. Then he did something I had never seen Dale Kroll do in nineteen years.

He put his arm around my shoulders, in front of the whole road, and held on for a second longer than he needed to.

He smelled like Old Spice and diesel. I didn’t trust myself to say anything, so I didn’t.