The Wedding Supper in the Machine Shed

Four years

My name is Karen Lindquist. I am fifty-two. I live with my husband Steve on a quarter section six miles south of the home place, in Kingsbury County, in eastern South Dakota, where the land is flat enough that you can watch your company coming for ten minutes.

I keep books part time for three farm families and the elevator in town, and I keep my father’s books for nothing, because he is my father and because he would otherwise keep them in a coffee can.

My mother was Arlene Peterson. She taught Sunday school at Our Savior’s Lutheran for thirty-one years and she could make a pan of scotcheroos disappear from a funeral lunch before the pastor finished the benediction.

She was the loudest laugh in any church basement in the county.

She got sick the fall I turned forty-seven. It was in her pancreas, and by the time they found it in Sioux Falls there was not much anybody could do except make her comfortable.

She chose to come home. She wanted to look out her own window at her own fields.

Hospice came out three times a week. They set up a hospital bed in the living room where the piano used to be, and somebody had to sit with her through the nights, because Dad had been up since four with the cattle and he would fall asleep sitting up.

Gary took the nights. Nobody asked him to. He just showed up the first evening with a pillow under his arm and said, “Go to bed, Dad,” and sat down in the brown recliner beside her bed, and he did that for six weeks straight.

I came in the mornings, after Steve’s breakfast. I would find Gary there with his boots off and his socks on the footrest, holding Mom’s hand, both of them asleep, and the little radio on the end table still playing the gospel station out of Watertown.

He was there when she went. Four in the morning, in March, with the wind pushing snow against the north window.

He called me before he woke Dad. I have never asked him what she said at the end.

I figured if he wanted me to know, he would tell me.

So when Gary said she’s after the farm, I did not hear a greedy man. I heard a man who had held his mother’s hand while she died and who had not set that hand down since.

That was where his anger came from. It came from that brown recliner.

Jim is different. Jim is the baby, forty-nine now, and he moved to Sioux Falls after college and sells insurance there.

He drives up most Saturdays. He is softer than Gary and he follows Gary, the way he followed him across the creek ice when they were boys, even when the ice was not good.

And then there was Dad, rattling around that house alone.

The first year he was all right because there was so much to do. Probate, and the stone, and thank you cards, and calving.

The second winter was bad. I would come by on a Tuesday and find the same pan of hot dish in the refrigerator I had brought on Friday, eaten from one corner.