The Farm Sign at the End of Our Lane
Stan has what the doctor in Lafayette called a mixed picture. His heart is weak and the pump does not move the blood the way it should, so he tires walking from the bed to the kitchen. And apart from the heart there is a fogginess in his thinking, a closing of the small pipes in the brain, a few at a time. It comes like weather. Some days he is the man I married, dry and exact, correcting my grammar. Other days he looks at me across the table with perfect politeness and asks whether I have come about the hay.
We call the good days good mornings, because they almost always come in the morning. By afternoon the fog usually rolls in. But between about nine and noon, on a good day, Stan is there. He knows the year. He knows our children’s names and birthdays.
And every day that he is able, at half past ten, he asks me to drive him to the mailbox.
I cannot tell you how much that mailbox matters. It is a half mile of gravel he cannot walk, and the mail is nearly always a feed circular and a seed catalog and something from Medicare. But the sign stands next to the mailbox, and every morning when we pull up, Stan rolls his window down and reads it out loud. He does it with one finger, tracing the air in front of the glass, the way a boy reads his first book. Petrak Farm. Stan and Lavonne. Since 1976.
He does not read it for information. He knows what it says. He reads it the way you say grace.
I asked the home health nurse about it once, Colleen Rudd, who comes Tuesdays and Fridays and has the steadiest hands I know. She said that when a person’s memory goes, the things that stay are the things that were written down in the places he walked past every day. “He may lose the year and the name of the president, Lavonne, but he’ll know that sign till the end. It’s holding him up.”
I did not tell Stan on Monday.
I want to confess that, because I am not proud of the next three mornings and I would rather you hear it from me.
At half past ten on Monday he was in his chair by the window with a blanket over his knees, and he looked up at me with those bright, clear eyes and said, “Mailbox?” and I heard myself say, “The county’s got a grader on the lane, hon. We’ll go by the field road.”
There was no grader. There is a field road, though, a rutted track that runs along the back of the bean ground and comes out on the county road a quarter mile east, where you can reach the mailbox from the opposite direction. From there, with the truck facing the right way, the sign is behind you. You can pull up to the box and get the mail and Stan never has to turn his head.
I did that on Monday. I did it again on Tuesday. On Wednesday Stan said, “That grader’s slow,” and I said, “County’s county,” and he laughed his dry laugh and went back to looking at the corn stubble.
It was Wednesday night, a little after eleven, that I understood what I had been doing.
I was sitting up in the kitchen with the light off, because the kitchen is where I pray, and I was telling the Lord, not for the first time, about my son. Partway into it, something stopped me in the middle of a sentence, as if a hand had been laid flat on the table in front of me.