The Spring I Planted Daddy’s Ground

The paper was from a lender in Sioux Falls. Craig had filled in every line of it in his neat salesman’s printing, everything except my name, and he slid it across our kitchen table with his good pen lying on top.

“Just sign by the yellow sticker, Dana,” he said. “Two places. I already did the hard part.”

I didn’t pick up the pen. I looked at the paper instead, and I read the legal description of my father’s land typed out in a box, the township and the section and the quarter, like it was a used Silverado on his lot.

It was a Thursday night in April, a little after nine.

I had been up since four thirty to case my mail, and I still had the smell of the post office on my hands, that dry paper and rubber band smell that never quite washes off.

“What is this for?” I asked.

Craig sat down across from me. He was forty-seven years old and he still had the boyish face that sold trucks, the one that made farmers trust him with their trade-ins.

He folded his hands on the table like he was closing a deal.

“It’s a loan against the eighty,” he said. “A hundred thousand. Interest only for the first year. We don’t touch the ground, nobody farms it any different, it just sits there working for us.”

“We have the house money,” I said. “Why would we need a loan?”

He didn’t answer right away. He looked at the pen. He looked at the refrigerator, where I had a picture of Daddy on his tractor stuck up with a magnet from the co-op.

Then he looked at me, and I knew before he said a word.

“The house money’s gone, Dana.”

I remember the furnace kicked on. I remember the sound of it, that low push of air through the floor vent by my feet, and how normal it was, and how nothing else in the kitchen was normal anymore.

“Gone where?” I said.

“I was going to get it back before you found out.” His voice was very steady, which was the worst part.

“I had it almost back twice. Last fall I was up forty thousand in one weekend. If I’d quit then, you’d never have known any of it.”

“Two hundred and ten thousand dollars, Craig.”

“I know the number.”

“Daddy left that for a house. He said it to both of us, in the hospital. He said, you kids quit renting and get a place with a yard.”

“I know what he said.” Craig rubbed his eyes. “That’s why I need the loan. One good stretch, and I put the whole thing back by fall. I’ve got a system now. I wasn’t careful before. Now I’m careful.”

He believed it. I want to say that plainly, because people hear a story like this and picture a man who doesn’t care.

Craig cared. He sat at that table and believed with his whole heart that he was one weekend away from fixing everything.

I picked up the pen then. I turned it around in my fingers, and I set it down on his side of the table, right in front of his folded hands.

“No,” I said.

He looked at the pen like I had handed him something dead.