The Girl Who Carried the Farm Sign

The morning after

Mom came at seven-thirty on Sunday morning in her church dress, before the eight-thirty service. She did not bring bars.

She sat down at our kitchen table across from Lily, who was still in her pajamas eating cereal, and she folded her hands.

“Lily,” she said. “I told Donna you couldn’t ride on the float, and I told her why, and it was wrong. You are a Gustafson. You were always a Gustafson. I was the one who forgot it.”

Lily put her spoon down. She looked at me, and I did not say anything. It was hers to answer.

“Grandpa told me about Hilda,” Lily said. “She was from a first marriage too.”

“I know,” Mom said. “I’d forgotten that too. I think maybe I wanted to forget it.”

Then she said the part that undid me, the part I did not see coming.

“Next summer the fair board wants us back,” Mom said. “Grandpa already told Donna yes. And I’m going to need somebody to help me paint the float. I can’t do the lettering the way you did that sign. Would you help me, honey? I’d need you every night for two weeks, probably.”

Lily looked at her grandmother for a long time. Kids take their time with these things, and they should.

“Can I ride in front?” she asked.

“You can ride wherever you want,” Mom said. “You can drive the tractor if Ben says so.”

“I’m eleven, Grandma.”

“Well,” Mom said, and for the first time in two days, she smiled. “Next year you’ll be twelve.”

Lily laughed. It was a small laugh, but it was a real one. And she said yes.

Hilda’s sign

Dad hung Hilda’s sign back up the next week. Not in the rafters of the machine shed.

He and Ben put it on the front of the machine shed, over the big door, where everybody who comes up the driveway sees it, right above the new Century Farm sign.

Lily was there when they did it. She held the ladder for her grandpa, the way he had held it for her.

The family Bible

There is one more thing, and it is the thing I think about most.

The Gustafson family Bible is a heavy black one with a cracked spine that came over from Sweden with Hilda’s mother. It sits on the shelf in Mom’s front room.

Inside the front cover are the family pages, every birth and marriage and death going back to 1890, in five different handwritings.

Mom had written Owen’s name in it the week he was born. Owen Arne Holm, with the date and the hospital in Mankato. I had seen it there at Christmas.

I had never looked for Lily’s name. I think part of me already knew.

That same Sunday, after dinner, Mom asked Lily to come into the front room with her. I stood in the doorway.

Mom took the Bible down off the shelf and opened it on the coffee table to the family pages, and she uncapped the good fountain pen that had been her own mother’s.

“I should have done this eleven years ago,” she said. “I’d like you to watch me do it.”

Then my mother bent over the page and wrote, slowly, in her best Palmer cursive, right underneath my name: Lily Ann Larson, born March 9, at Mayo in Rochester, daughter of Kristin.

She blew on the ink, and then she held the Bible out so Lily could see her name on the page with everybody else’s, right there in the hundred years, where it had belonged all along.