The Farm Sign at the End of Our Lane
Then Stan, who was still looking at the sign, said in a quite different voice, a clear one, a voice from the other side of the fog, “Jared. Come here a minute.”
My son crossed the road. His boots crunched on the gravel. He stopped beside the truck door, and he was a forty-seven-year-old man with a farm loan and a family and a bad back, and he looked about nine.
Stan did not look at him right away. He said to the sign, “Are you ashamed of my name, son?”
“No, Dad.” It came out of Jared broken. “No. God, no.”
“Then what is it?”
My son took a long, shaking breath.
“I’m afraid,” he said. “I’m so afraid, Dad. The loan renews in November and Gail at the bank says the operator of record has to be somebody who can sign, and you can’t, not reliably, and you wouldn’t do the paper, I asked you three times. And I thought if the sign said it, if the whole county saw it, they’d just see me. They wouldn’t see… I didn’t want them to see…” He stopped.
“A farm going down with a sick man,” Stan said.
“I didn’t mean for you to see it. I swear to God. I thought you’d never…”
“Never know the difference.”
Jared put his hand over his eyes.
My husband sat quietly in the passenger seat of his own truck for what felt like a full minute. Then he turned and looked up at his son, fully, with those clear brown eyes that had come back into focus like a window being wiped, and I will carry what he said until the day I die.
“Well, now,” Stan said gently. “That’s the first honest thing anybody’s told me all week.”
He reached out of the window and put his big, spotted, shaking hand on the side of Jared’s face.
“Afraid I know about, son. I’ve been afraid for two years in this truck. I just never painted a sign about it.”
Jared made a sound then. I will not describe it. I got out of the truck, and I walked around, and I put my arms around the both of them, as well as I could with a truck door between us, and the three of us stayed that way at the end of our lane with the morning going bright around us and a feed truck slowing as it passed, and then deciding, wisely, not to stop.
Stan’s fog came back that afternoon, a heavy one. He slept most of the evening and woke at suppertime to ask whether the cattle had been fed, which we have not had since 2011. When he was settled I went out to the porch, where I found my son sitting on the top step in the dusk with his hands hanging between his knees.
He had not gone home. Tessa, his wife, had come by at noon with a casserole and a look, and he had sent her back. He had been out in the machine shed most of the afternoon, he said, and he had something to show me.
I followed him across the yard. In the back of the shed, behind the grain cart, standing against the wall under a blue tarp, was the old board.