The Farm Sign at the End of Our Lane
“Jared goes under us,” Stan said. “That’s the order. A son’s name goes under his father’s till the father’s done. And when I’m done,” he said, and he said it plainly, without any self-pity, the way he used to read grain prices, “you paint it yourself. Take the pattern and move the line up. You do it on a Saturday, in daylight, in front of God and the county, with your brush and nobody else’s. Not before. Not at night. You hear me?”
“Yes, sir.”
“I’m not going to be hard about it, Jared. The bank’s got a point. A farm needs somebody who can sign.” Stan’s eyes moved to me. “Vonnie, call that girl at the bank. Monday. I’ll sign her whatever she wants while I can still hold a pen.”
I said I would.
“And the boy gets the whole operating paper. Not a hired man’s wage, either. A partner’s cut.” He looked at Jared hard. “I should have done that ten years ago. I knew it. I kept putting it off because it felt like giving up a thing I wasn’t done with. That wasn’t your fault, son. That was mine. You asked me three times, and I turned you down three times, and a man who does that to his boy has no business being surprised when the boy goes looking for a way to make it real.”
Jared sat back on his heels in the gravel. He said nothing for a long time. Brynn, standing beside him with her brush, quietly handed him a paper towel.
“I’m sorry, Dad,” he said finally. “I’m so sorry.”
“I know you are.” Stan settled back in his chair and closed his eyes. “Now do the S’s. They’re hard.”
We went to the Brannock State Bank on Monday at ten, on a good morning Stan had earned by sheer will. Jared drove. Stan rode in front in his pressed church shirt with his hair combed wet, and Tessa met us in the lobby with a folder. Gail Teague, the loan officer, a brisk woman in her fifties who had been a few years ahead of Jared in school, led us into a conference room and offered Stan the good chair.
I will tell you what she said, because I think about it often. She looked at the folder, and she looked at Stan, and she said, “Mr. Petrak, I never needed the sign.”
Jared stared at her.
“I told you in August the bank needed to know who the operator was,” she said to him, almost gently. “I meant a letter. A one-page signed letter from your father naming you as operator and giving you signing authority on the operating line. Honestly, Jared, you could have had that in ten minutes. I wondered why you never came back about it.” She slid a single sheet of paper across the table. “I’d have told you if you had asked.”
My son sat there with his mouth a little open. Then, to my everlasting surprise, he began to laugh. It was a helpless, cracked kind of laugh, the laugh of a man who has carried a mountain of grain up a hill on his back and been told there was a road.
Stan signed the letter. His signature wobbled across the line, but it was his, with the old looping S, and the bank’s notary witnessed it. Then he signed the operating agreement and a power of attorney naming Jared and me. It took eleven minutes, and it would have taken eleven minutes in August.