The Weekend We Booked Dad’s Farmhouse

After the hip surgery and the rehab, Dad could not go home. Everybody said it, the doctor and the social worker and my brother Erik and finally Dad himself, sitting on a hospital bed looking at his hands.

So we found him a room at Prairie View in town, a nice place with a big window and a bird feeder outside it. He pretends he does not watch the birds. He watches the birds.

The farmhouse sat. We kept the electric on and the furnace set low. Erik and I told each other we would deal with the house after harvest, after we could stand being in it.

My mother had been gone six years, and the house still smelled like her on the stairs. Neither of us was ready to sort her dish towels into boxes.

Dad gave Gordon the emergency key the week he moved. I was there. Dad pressed it into his palm and closed Gordon’s fingers over it like a coin he wanted kept safe.

“Keep an eye on the place, Gordy,” Dad said.

“You know I will,” Gordon said. “I’ll keep an eye on the place, Arne.”

Every Sunday after that, when I called Dad, he asked me the same thing at the end. Gordy keeping an eye on the place? And I said I was sure he was, because I was sure he was.

I called Erik from my car in the parking lot after work. Erik is 45, an electrician in Sioux Falls, a big quiet man who says about a third of what he thinks.

He listened to the whole thing without a word. Then he said, “I’m driving over there tonight and taking that key off him.”

“It’s over an hour each way, Erik.”

“I know how far it is.”

I could hear him reaching for his keys. Erik has always been the one Dad called when the yard light went out or the well pump quit. He fixes things first and talks about them never.

“Wait,” I said. “Just wait one night. Please.”

I sat in my car with the engine running for the air conditioner and thought about what I wanted. I could have called the county sheriff. A lot of people would tell you that is what I should have done.

A man let himself into a house he did not own and rented it to strangers for money. There is a word for that, and it is not a nice one.

But I kept seeing Gordon at my mother’s funeral, one of the six men carrying her casket down the church steps, his jaw set so hard I thought it would crack.

I kept seeing him at Dad’s kitchen table the night she died, the two of them not talking, just drinking coffee until the sun came up.

I did not want an old man in handcuffs. I wanted the key back. And I did not want Dad to hear it from me on a Sunday phone call, the way you hear that somebody has died.

If Dad was going to hear it, I wanted him to hear it from Gordon, face to face, the way men of their age settle things.