The Farm Sign at the End of Our Lane
I want to be fair to him. He did not pretend. He rolled out from under the planter with grease to his elbows and his reading glasses pushed up in his hair, and he looked at me, and I watched him decide not to lie. That is something. I have known grown men who could not do it.
“It’s the farm’s sign, Mom,” he said. “The bank wants to see one name at the end of the lane, and one name on the paperwork. They’ve been after me about it since August. Dad won’t know the difference.”
He said it flat, almost gently, the way you explain something to a child who is going to ask why again. Then he wiped his hands on a red rag and added, “It’s just paint.”
I stood there. I want to tell you I said something wise. I did not. I looked at my boy, with his father’s jaw and my mother’s gray eyes, and I thought, you have no idea what you just said. You said it about your father, and you said it in my hearing, and you have no idea.
What I said was, “I see.”
Then I turned around and walked back out into the daylight, and I went to the house to give my husband his pills.
That sign was the first thing we ever made together. Stan and I bought the old Hostetler place in the spring of 1976. It was a hundred and sixty acres of tired ground and a house with no insulation, and we paid for it with a loan from the Brannock State Bank, a handshake from old Mr. Hostetler’s widow, and every dollar of wedding money we had been given three months before. Stan was twenty-four. I was twenty-one. I had been painting window signs and fair banners for Voss Hardware since I was sixteen, and the day after we signed the papers, I stood in the yard with a quart of one-shot enamel and a number-four brush and told my husband we were not going to be a farm with no name.
He built the board. I drew the letters on butcher paper, and then I pricked every line of them with a darning needle and pounced them through with a chalk bag, the way old Mr. Voss taught me, so the pattern would be exact and could be used again. I painted a yellow wheat sheaf in the corner. In black letters I wrote Petrak Farm. Beneath it, a little smaller, Stan and Lavonne. Beneath that, Since 1976.
Stan stood back with his arms folded and read it three times. Then he said, “Well, Vonnie. Now it’s real.”
I redid that board every ten years. Once in 1986, once in 1996, once in 2006, once in 2016, each time with the same pattern, each time on a Saturday in June, with Stan in a lawn chair telling me my R’s leaned. He was right. They always did. I never fixed it, because it would not have been my R.
So you see what I was looking at, in the road, with a grain truck going around me. It was not a sign. It was the first sentence we ever wrote.
Now let me tell you about my husband, because the whole story hangs on him.