The Overalls a Young Farmer Asked For

The bibs I had touched exactly once. In November I stood at the mudroom hooks with my hand out and my fingers found the chest pocket on the hickory pair. There was the pencil. The flat stub, soft at the corners, with the little teeth marks near the end where he chewed it when he was working out a number.

I took my hand out of that pocket as though it had burned me. I never put it back in.

So that is where I was on that April morning with Nate on my porch. Six months, and a closet full of a dead man, and a promise I had made to my daughter three times and broken three times.

And this tall, red eared young man asking me, in a voice that cracked on the second word, if he could wear the one thing in the house I could not look at.

“Come in,” I said finally. I do not know where it came from. “You’ll catch your death out there.”

I poured two cups. He sat at the kitchen table with his cap on his knee and held the cup in both hands without drinking, and I sat across from him, and the clock over the stove ticked the way it had for forty years.

“I’m going to tell you why,” Nate said. “Because otherwise it’ll sound like I’m after a souvenir.”

“I don’t think you’re after a souvenir.”

“It’s not that. I don’t think it’s that.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m planting the home eighty this year, did you know that? Ev told me last summer he wanted me to take it, and then he, well. And I never heard from you about it, and I didn’t want to push. So I’ve been getting the back one sixty ready, and I figured I’d ask you about the home eighty when you were ready.”

I had not known. I had not thought about the home eighty at all, if I’m honest. I had thought about the funeral and the closet and the checking account, and I had left the land alone in my mind like a dog that has been told to stay.

“It’s yours to plant,” I said. “I should have said so in the fall. I’m sorry.”

“No ma’am. Don’t be sorry.” He turned the cup a quarter turn. “I’m just telling you why I’m asking about the overalls. Because I’d be on his ground, on the first day. And I keep thinking about it.”

He stopped for a second. His jaw worked.

“I was fifteen,” he said, “when I first came out this road.”

I knew that part, or I thought I did. I knew he was a boy from town, from the little rental house on Maple Street in Cherokee, whose mother cleaned patient rooms at the hospital on the night shift. I knew his father had gone to Texas to drive truck when Nate was in sixth grade and sent a card at Christmas for a couple of years and then stopped.

What I did not know was how he had come. Nate told me that morning, slowly, looking at the table.

It was July. He walked out from town on a Tuesday, the whole nine miles, because he had heard at the Casey’s that Mr. Hartwig sometimes paid a kid to pick rock. His bike had a flat and he had no patch kit, so he left it in a ditch and walked.