The Farm Sign at the End of Our Lane

There was a silence. Then, in a voice I had not heard from him since he was a boy who had broken a window, he said, “Mom, I don’t think…”

“I’m not asking you to think, honey,” I said. “I’m asking you to be there.”

He was there.

At twenty-five past ten, when I pulled the truck up to the mouth of the lane with Stan beside me and a thermos of coffee between us, Jared’s pickup was already parked on the shoulder across the road with the door open. He was standing beside it with his seed cap in both hands. He had washed his face. He looked like a man waiting outside a principal’s office.

I stopped the truck so the sign faced Stan’s window head-on. I turned off the engine. And then, because this was his and not mine, I did not say a single word.

Stan rolled down his window.

The morning was very clear. The frost had not come yet, but there was a bite in the air, and the hickory at the corner had turned the color of a new penny. A killdeer was running along the ditch. Stan put his arm out the window and raised one finger, and I watched him read.

“Jared,” he said slowly. “Petrak. Farms.”

His finger moved down the board.

“Owner. And. Operator.”

His finger stopped. It hung in the air, trembling just a little, the way it does now, and stayed there.

“That’s a nice piece of lettering,” Stan said. His voice was perfectly calm. “Who did the lettering, son?”

Across the road, Jared’s face worked. “A shop in Lafayette, Dad. They printed it.”

“Printed.” Stan nodded as if that explained something. He kept looking at the board. And then he turned his head, slowly, and looked at me, and I saw the fog come into his eyes for the first time that morning. It came in softly, the way it does, from the edges, like breath on a cold window. He said, in a small, confused voice that I would give anything not to have heard:

“Vonnie. Did I sell the place?”

I do not know what I had braced for. Anger, maybe. I had not braced for that.

“No, Stan.”

“I don’t remember selling it.” He looked back at the sign. “Somebody has put a different name on it. I thought… did I sign something? Did I forget something I signed?” He was not frightened, exactly. It was worse than frightened. He was apologizing. He was a man of seventy-four who had paid off a farm in twenty-two years and never missed a payment, and he was searching his own failing mind for the day he had given it away.

“You didn’t sell anything, honey,” I said, and I put my hand over his on the window frame. “You didn’t sign anything. Nobody has taken anything from you.”

“Then why does it say that?”

I did not answer him. It was not my answer to give.

I looked across the road.

My son was crying. I had not seen him cry since his grandfather’s funeral. He had put his cap over his mouth and he was standing very straight, and tears were running down his face and into the collar of his canvas coat, and he made no sound. For a minute nobody said a word. The killdeer lifted off the ditch. A truck went by in the distance and its sound went away.