The Overalls a Young Farmer Asked For

That fall, the last fall, was the strange one. Ev had cash rented the back one hundred and sixty acres to Nate for three seasons by then, and he still farmed the home eighty himself with Nate’s help, the way you keep one hand on the wheel after you hand over the keys.

He could not climb the ladder into the combine by September. So Nate ran the combine, and Ev rode along in the buddy seat in his hickory bibs, which hung on him by then like a sack on a fence. He sat there for two days, nodding, watching the monitor.

That was the last time Ev wore the hickory pair. He came in from the field the second night and hung them on the third hook and said, “That’ll do for the year,” and he never put them on again.

After the funeral, there was a whole season of people. Casseroles and cards and ladies from Immanuel Lutheran in my kitchen opening cupboards they had no business opening. The farm kept itself going on the strength of the neighbors, and I stood in the middle of it feeling like a woman at the wrong end of a long table.

When they all went home, I tried to be sensible about the clothes. I really did try.

Diane came the week of Thanksgiving. She is forty nine, a fourth grade teacher in Omaha, and the most organized person I have ever known, which she gets from me. She brought a box of black contractor bags in the trunk of her Buick.

“Mom, I’m not going to push,” she said. “But it’s going to be easier if we do it together, and soon. It doesn’t get easier the longer you leave it.”

“I know that,” I said.

“I’ll do the closet and you sit with your tea. We’ll keep the things that matter and the rest go to the church clothing closet. Somebody can use them.”

“I know it, Diane.”

We stood there. She had a bag open in her hands, and I was looking at the bag, and I could not make my mouth say yes.

“After Christmas,” I said. “I promise. After Christmas.”

She put the bag down very carefully, like it might go off. She did not say another word about it.

Craig took the pocket watch and the shotgun and said he needed nothing else, and I could tell he wanted to say more and could not find where to start.

At Christmas I said after the new year. In February I said after the thaw. Pastor Dahl stopped by in March with a plate of lemon bars, and he looked at the three iron hooks by the door and did not say a word, which was the kindest thing anybody did that whole winter.

I understand why people think a widow keeps her husband’s clothes out of weakness. That is not it. Or it is not only it.

Here is the truth, and I am a little ashamed of it. His shirts still smelled like him. Not like cologne, because Ev never wore any. Like machine oil and Lava soap and cold air and something under it that I could not name if you paid me.

I did not want some woman at the church clothing closet to hold his shirt up to the light and say this one has some wear left in it, and hand it to a stranger who would put it through a machine on hot.