The Row She Planted on Her Own Ground

Kent had his cap off. He is not a man who shows you much of what is in him.

He stood there at the end of the field with his cap wadded in his hand watching his sister plant, and I saw him swipe the back of his wrist across his face and jam the cap back down and look off like it was only the dust getting to him.

Dustin put his arm around my shoulders. “Mom,” he said, low. “You should have just told us at Easter. We’d have said something to him.”

“You’d have argued with your father across the ham in front of the grandkids,” I said, “and it would have turned into a fight, and nothing would have gone in the ground.”

He watched his sister come back toward us down the field. “Yeah,” he said finally. “I guess that wouldn’t have fixed it anyhow.”

“No,” I said. “This fixes it.”

We stood there until she had three good rows in and the pattern of it was set in the dirt for anyone to see. Then the boys had their own six hundred acres standing and waiting on them, so they squeezed my shoulder each in turn and walked back across the worked ground to go plant their father’s home place.

They are good boys, the both of them. None of this was ever their doing.

They were simply never asked, and neither was their sister, and that was the whole wrong at the heart of it. Nobody in this family ever got asked.

The Quiet After

Harold came up to the river piece near noon.

He parked his truck on the blacktop and got out and stood at the fence line with his hands pushed down in his jacket pockets and watched our daughter plant. He did not come down into the field.

He just stood up there at the wire and watched her lay the rows north and south the way her grandfather laid them, finishing each pass hard against the old man’s windbreak.

I walked up out of the field and stood at the fence beside him. We did not say much at first.

Thirty-nine years married and you learn there are things that do not need saying out loud, and would only get smaller and cheaper if you tried to force them into words.

“She’s driving it by hand,” he said after a while. “Guidance is right there in the cab and she’s steering every pass herself.”

“She wanted to plant it the way my dad did,” I said. “North and south. Start on the road, finish at the trees.”

Harold watched another pass go up the field. Shelby’s green tractor crept up the black ground toward the timber, straight as my father ever drove it, the planter stitching the rows in behind her.

“Your dad was a better farmer than he ever let on,” Harold said.

He was quiet a good minute, working it over. “I had it wrong, Marilyn.