The Overalls a Young Farmer Asked For

When I could breathe I went down the stairs, and I took the hickory bibs off the third hook.

They were lighter than I remembered. Or I was stronger. I carried them to the kitchen table under the light and spread them out, and the left knee with its red gingham patch lay there looking up at me like a little flag.

I put my hand in the chest pocket first. The pencil was there, exactly as before, and I let it lie.

Then I put my hand in the right hip pocket, which I had never touched, and found the notebook.

It was the small kind, with a spiral across the top and a cardboard cover gone soft as cloth. It was from the co-op, the year’s calendar printed on the inside cover in red. I almost put it back. It felt like reading his mail.

But I opened it. And I understood what I was holding, and I sat down.

Ev kept a planting log. That was what the notebook was, and it was in this pocket, every spring, and I had never once known. Each page was a date and a field and a number. Soil temperature, seed variety, row width, the day the first leaves broke ground. Every spring since he started, in his blocky pencil hand, and when one notebook was full he put it in a coffee can in the shop and started another.

I turned the pages. April 22, 2019, 51 degrees. Corn in. May 3, 2020, wet, waited. April 25, 2023, home eighty, N. on the planter, I ran the seed boxes.

The N. started showing up in 2022. A letter here, a letter there, in the margins. N. disked the back. N. says the tile’s running. N. is a good hand.

My eyes were not working right by then. I kept turning.

The last pages were from last spring, and the writing had gotten smaller and a little shaky. Corn in April 26. Beans May 7. Home eighty done, N. did the headlands better than me.

And then a page from the last week of September, by itself. I have read it so many times since that I could recite it in my sleep.

It said: Combine, N. runs it. Don’t fuss. Next year, N. plants the home 80. J. to know.

That was all. Four lines, in pencil, with the pencil pressed hard.

J. to know.

I have turned that over and over. I think he meant me. I think he meant to tell me, and the time slid away, and the days in the end went the way they do, and he put it where he put everything, in the right hip pocket, where a man could find it without looking.

I don’t know that he meant me to find it that way. I know what I did. I held that notebook against my chest at the kitchen table, at eleven o’clock at night, and said out loud to the empty room, “Well, Ev, I know now.”

Then I got up and wiped my face and went to the sewing room.