The Overalls a Young Farmer Asked For

He came up the lane at four in the afternoon with his shirt stuck to him, and Ev was at the shop door with a grease rag. And Nate said, “I’m here about the rock.”

“What did Ev say?” I asked. I had a feeling in my chest that I could not account for.

“He looked at my shoes. They were basketball shoes, the kind with the holes in the toes. And he said, ‘You’ll want boots for that.’ And he went in the house, I mean, he came in this house, and he came back with a pair of Craig’s old boots from your basement. And a sandwich. And he drove me home in the pickup at dark because of the bike.”

I remembered the boots. I remembered Ev coming in and asking me if I still had Craig’s old work boots, and I said they were in a tub in the basement, and he went down without a word. I had thought he was taking them to the Goodwill.

“Nine dollars an hour,” Nate said. “To pick rock. For a month. That was more money than I’d ever seen.”

“He paid you that?”

“Ma’am, I found out later nobody else around here paid more than seven, for picking rock.” He almost smiled. “He never said.”

I laughed, a short sound that surprised both of us. That was Ev exactly. Quiet kindness, tucked in sideways, no receipt.

Nate kept coming. All that summer, and the next. At sixteen Ev put him on the small tractor, and at seventeen he taught him to drive the big one with a disk behind it, a straight pass, no wobble.

He taught him to read a soil test and what the numbers meant. He taught him how to talk to a banker, which was to wear a clean shirt, bring your own figures, and never say sorry for the question. He taught him to walk a field before planting, to pick up a handful of dirt and squeeze it and open his hand and see what it did.

“He told me when to quit,” Nate said. “That was the one that took me the longest. Everybody tells you how to start. He told me when to quit for the day and go home to my mother. He said the ground would be there in the morning.”

“Did he go to your graduation?” I said. I don’t know why I asked it. I think I wanted to know if I had been somewhere I did not remember.

“He did. He sat in the back. He had on the gray suit.” Nate looked up at me. “You were there, too. You sat next to him.”

I had been. I had thought it was the Anderson boy’s graduation we were going to, because the Andersons attended our church, and I never put it together. Ev said, “Let’s go see the kids walk,” and I put on my good blouse.

I put my hand over my mouth. Nate looked at the table again, politely, the way a good boy looks away from a woman’s face.

Neither of us said anything for a while after that.

“The reason I’m asking,” Nate went on, and he said it very quietly, “is that the first day every spring, I’d watch him. At the end of the lane. With his hand on the pocket. I always wanted to ask what it was. I never did.”