The Morning Mom Finally Saw the Ocean

Dad kept promising for thirty-one more years. Next year, he would say. After harvest. When the note is paid. The coffee can filled up and emptied out again, the way coffee cans on a farm do.

Then almost five years ago, in October, Dad died in the shop. He was sharpening a sickle section on the grinder and he sat down on his stool and did not get up.

Randy found him. I have never asked Randy what that was like, and he has never offered to tell me.

My brother Randy is four years older than me. He is the one who stayed and farmed. He took over Dad’s ground and his own, and he rents Mom’s cropland on a crop share, which is how it works with half the families in our county.

I am the one who went to the vocational school in Garden City and became a diesel mechanic. I work at the implement dealer in town. I have worked on most of the tractors in our county, including Randy’s, and I do not charge him labor.

After the funeral, there was a stack of papers on Mom’s kitchen table a foot high. Bank statements, insurance, the farm program papers, the Social Security letters. Mom had never written a check on the farm account in her life. Dad had always done that part.

Randy offered to take the farm program side off her hands. He knew the FSA people. He knew the forms. He said, “Mom, you don’t need to be driving to town and standing in line over this. Let me handle it.”

So in November, almost five years ago, Mom rode to town with Randy and sat down at the county FSA office and signed a form called an assignment of payment. It is a real form. It means that when the CRP money comes, it goes to the person you named instead of to you.

I was not there. I was at work. I did not know she had signed anything until almost a year later, and when I found out, Mom said it was so Randy could handle it, and I did not think anything more about it.

I should have thought more about it. I know that now.

Because the October money went to Randy, and it stayed with Randy. The first year, Mom said she supposed it had gone to the taxes. The second year, she said Randy must have needed it for something. The third year, she stopped mentioning it at all.

She was living on her Social Security and the crop share check from her cropland. She was not hungry. The house was paid for. But she was 81 and living on very little, and the coffee can in the pantry had been empty since the funeral.

Four Octobers. $28,800 that was hers.

So when Randy said she would only waste it on the bus trip, I understood for the first time that she had asked him for it. That she had swallowed her pride and asked her son for her own money, and he had told her no in front of her other son over cherry pie.

I followed him outside after dinner. He was standing by his pickup in the yard, looking at the sky the way all of us look at the sky in August, hoping for rain we know is not coming.

“You kept all of it?” I said. “All four years?”

“It’s handled, Matt.”

“That’s not what I asked.”