The Spring I Planted Daddy’s Ground
“You’d rather that dirt just sit there,” he said quietly, “than have a house?”
“It isn’t going to sit there,” I said, and I didn’t know yet what I meant by it.
I only knew I would not sign my father’s ground over to a man who had just told me he’d bet away everything else my father gave us.
Craig got up and went out to the garage. I heard his truck start, and then I heard it shut off again, and he just sat out there in the dark.
I sat at the table with the loan paper until almost midnight, and I didn’t cry once.
My father was Harold Lutz, and he farmed outside Canton, South Dakota, for forty-one years.
He was a corn and soybean man, a quiet Lutheran who wore the same style of seed cap his whole life and thought a man’s word was worth more than his signature.
He owned two pieces. The home quarter, with the house and the barn and the cattle yard, he sold when Mother died, because he couldn’t stand to live in that kitchen without her.
The other was the eighty. That one he never would sell.
The eighty was the first land he ever bought, in 1979, with a loan he paid off one hard harvest at a time.
It sits two miles east of town, flat as a table, black dirt that sticks to your boots in spring, with a shelterbelt of trees his own father planted along the edge.
When his knees went bad, about ten years ago, he couldn’t climb up and down the tractor the way he used to.
The Meyers lived on the next place over, and their boy Evan used to ride his bike down the gravel to watch Daddy work.
Evan was twelve the first spring Daddy let him ride the tractor step. By thirteen he was greasing the planter.
By fourteen he could back a gravity wagon up to the auger better than most grown men in the county, and Daddy would brag about him at the coffee shop like he was blood.
“That Meyer kid listens,” Daddy told me once. “Most people wait for you to stop talking so they can talk. That boy listens to the ground.”
Daddy died three years ago in March, of his heart, in the hospital in Sioux Falls. Craig and I were both there.
He held my hand and told us about the money, how he had put it back for us out of the sale of the home quarter, and how he wanted us out of a rented house.
“You’ve paid somebody else’s mortgage long enough,” he said. “Get a yard. Plant a garden. Craig, you take care of my girl.”
Craig cried at that. I remember. He held Daddy’s other hand and said he would, and I believe he meant every word.
The land came to me alone. Daddy had put it in my name years before he passed, and the money came to both of us in a joint account at the bank in Canton.
We didn’t buy a house that first year. Prices were high, and Craig said we should wait.
That was the same winter the truck lot cut his days. Sales were slow, and the owner took him down from five days to three.