The Spring Grandma Rode in My Tractor

Roger did not come to Grandma’s for Christmas dinner. He sent his wife, Sue, with a pan of bars and an excuse about his back. Sue would not look me in the eye, and I did not make her.

I want to be fair to Sue. I do not think she knew until it was done.

She sat at the end of Grandma’s table and held Maisie for a while, and when she handed her back, her eyes were wet.

In February, Grandma told me something she had been sitting on. We were folding towels at her kitchen table, and she said it without looking up.

“Roger is behind on his land payment,” she said. “Two payments behind. He bought that quarter in 2013, at the top, when everybody thought corn would be seven dollars forever.”

I remembered 2013. My dad had said at the time that Roger paid too much. He said it at the supper table, not unkindly, and Roger had not spoken to him for a month.

“He has been carrying that note for twelve years,” Grandma said. “The bank called him in October. He came here after and sat right where you are sitting, and he cried. I have not seen Roger cry since his dog died when he was nine.”

“That does not make it his corn.”

“No, it does not,” she said. “But I think he told himself it was mine. And whatever is mine is his someday, in his mind. So he decided someday came early.”

I folded a towel and set it on the pile. I did not want to feel sorry for him. I felt sorry for him anyway, a little, and that made me angrier than anything.

“You could have given him the money,” I said. “If he had come to you.”

“He did not come to me for money,” Grandma said. “He is too proud for that. He is too proud to ask, and not too proud to take. That is the part I have to fix, and I cannot fix it by paying his bills.”

Spring came late. We got a snow the last week of April that took four days to melt off, and then all at once the ground dried and warmed, and everybody in the county was in the field at once.

Ben’s dad brought over the planter on the first Monday in May. It was a twelve-row, older but well kept, and he pulled it behind his green tractor, the one with the newer cab and the buddy seat.

“Your grandma still wants to do this?” he asked me. He is a quiet man, Ben’s dad, and he was not asking to talk me out of it. He was asking because he wanted to adjust the step.

“She still wants to,” I said.

He spent twenty minutes in her yard with a wrench and a two-by-six, building a little wooden box step under the bottom rung of the cab ladder.

He did not say a word about why. He just made it so a ninety-one-year-old woman could climb it.

I planted after my shift at the co-op. I got off at four thirty and was in the yard by five fifteen, and the first evening, Grandma was already waiting on her porch.

I had changed into my tan canvas work jacket and pulled my ponytail through the back of a seed cap, the way I always plant.