The Overalls a Young Farmer Asked For
For six months I did not open the closet on Ev’s side of our bedroom. I dusted the dresser, I made the bed tight the way he liked it, and I stepped around that door like it was a soft spot in the floor.
Everything was still in there. Four flannel shirts on wooden hangers, the gray church suit from Diane’s wedding, his good Sunday shoes with the toes stuffed with newspaper, and on the shelf above, three caps from the seed company that had never once paid him a dime to wear them.
The bibs were in the mudroom, not the closet. Three pairs of blue denim bibs hung on three iron hooks by the back door, the same hooks they had hung on since 1974, and I walked past them forty times a day with my coffee cup and my eyes on the floor.
I had told my children I would deal with it after harvest. Then I told them after Christmas. Then I told them after planting, which is what you say in Cherokee County when you want a thing to go away for a season and you have a decent excuse.
That was where things stood on the third Saturday of April, a little before eight in the morning, when somebody knocked on the kitchen door instead of the front one.
It was Nate Bergquist. He stood on the porch step in clean jeans and a plain brown work jacket, with his seed cap already in both hands, turning it by the bill.
He was twenty six years old and six foot three, and he looked like a boy who had been sent to the principal’s office.
“Morning, Mrs. Hartwig,” he said. “I’m sorry to come so early. Kelsey said I ought to call first, and I said I’d lose my nerve if I did.”
“Nate,” I said. “Is everybody all right?”
“Yes, ma’am. Everybody’s fine. Ivy’s fine. It’s nothing like that.”
I stood there holding the door. The coffee was still dripping in the pot behind me, and I could smell it, and I could smell the wet gravel and the cold coming up off the yard.
“I wanted to ask you something,” Nate said. “And you can say no. I’d understand if you said no. I’d probably say no.”
“Then ask it.”
He looked at the cap. He looked at the porch boards. Then he looked at the mudroom window behind my shoulder, where the three pairs of bibs hung dark against the glass, and I knew before he opened his mouth.
“I’d like to borrow Ev’s overalls,” he said. “The planting ones. Just for the first day. I’d bring them back washed.”
I did not say anything for what felt like a full minute. A pickup went by out on the road, and I heard its tires change from gravel to the washboard by the Teigs’ mailbox, and I still had not said a word.
Let me back up and tell you who Ev was, because you cannot understand what that boy asked me without it.
Everett Hartwig farmed two hundred and forty acres northeast of Cherokee, out past Quimby on a gravel road that the county grades twice a year when it remembers. His father farmed it before him, and his father’s father broke the sod. Ev was the kind of man who read the soil tag on a seed bag the way other men read the box scores.