The Overalls a Young Farmer Asked For

“The pencil,” I said. “He said he was checking for the pencil.”

“Yeah.” Nate nodded. “That’s what he told me, too.”

We both let that sit there.

“I don’t need the shirts or the boots or anything,” he said. “I’m not asking for his things. I’ve got no right to that. But I thought if I put on the same bibs he put on, the first morning, and walked out to the end of that lane, then maybe it wouldn’t feel like I was just a guy with a borrowed planter. Maybe it’d feel like he sent me.”

His eyes were wet and he did not do a thing about it. He just sat there and let them be wet, with both hands on the cup, as plain about it as he was about everything.

“I’d bring them back washed,” he said again. “I’d bring them back the same day.”

I looked at him. This man had a two year old daughter and a wife on the night shift at Cherokee Regional and a seed bill the size of a pickup truck, and he had walked up my steps and handed me the hardest question of my winter as though it were a casserole dish.

I could have said yes, and I knew it. I could have gotten up and taken the hickory pair down off the third hook and handed them across the table, and he would have thanked me and gone home, and that would have been that.

And I sat there with the clock ticking over the stove, and my mouth opened, and what came out was not yes.

“Give me till tomorrow,” I said. “Come back after church.”

“Yes, ma’am.” He stood up so fast his chair legs scraped. “Of course. I’m sorry I put you on the spot.”

“You didn’t put me anywhere,” I said. “I put myself here a good while ago.”

He nodded. He put his cap on at the door and took it off again because he was in my house, and then he put it on again at the porch, and he went down the steps with his shoulders square.

At two o’clock Diane called on the telephone, as she does most Saturdays, and I nearly did not pick up.

“Mom? You sound funny.”

“I’m fine. Nate Bergquist came by this morning.”

“Oh, good, about the lease? Did you work out the home eighty?”

“He asked for your father’s overalls,” I said.

There was a silence on the line from Omaha. I could hear a dishwasher running behind her and a child somewhere, one of her neighbors’, I suppose.

“His overalls,” Diane said slowly. “Mom. Which ones?”

“The planting ones. The hickory.”

“Oh.” She took a breath. “Oh, Mom. Are you okay? What did you say?”

“I said I’d let him know tomorrow.”

“Do you want me to drive up tonight?”

“No,” I said. “No, honey. I think I have to do this one by myself.”

She did not argue, which is how I knew she understood more than I’d credited her with. She said, “Call me after,” and I said I would, and we hung up.

Then I went upstairs, and I opened the closet.

It smelled like him, of course. I stood in the door with my hand on the frame and I let it come over me, and I did not hold anything back. It was forty degrees outside and the window was open a crack, and I stood there and cried in a way I hadn’t since the funeral, bent over, with one hand pressed to my mouth, for what might have been ten minutes and might have been an hour.