The Spring I Planted Daddy’s Ground
Craig had sold used trucks in Sioux Falls for eighteen years, and suddenly he was home on a Tuesday with nothing to do but watch games.
It started with a free bet on an app. A friend at the lot showed him.
You can’t bet on your phone in South Dakota, but Iowa is twenty minutes away, and if your phone is across the line, the apps work. Craig started driving over to a gas station in Larchwood on game nights.
He told me he was going to see a guy about a trade-in. He told me he was getting gas because it was cheaper.
He told me a lot of things, and I believed all of them, because in twenty-two years of marriage he had never lied to me about anything I could remember.
I found out later it was fourteen months, start to finish.
Two hundred and ten thousand dollars, a few hundred at a time and then a few thousand at a time and then, near the end, twenty thousand in a single night on a basketball game in Ohio.
The next morning I went to work like always. That’s what you do on a rural route.
Six hundred and some boxes don’t care what happened at your kitchen table, and old Mr. Peterson on the gravel past the Lutheran church waits at his box every day for his paper.
I drove my route in a fog. Somewhere around the second loop, on a long stretch of county road with nothing but last year’s corn stubble on both sides, I pulled over on the shoulder and sat there with the engine running.
People have asked me since why I didn’t call somebody. A lawyer, the bank, the sheriff. But there was nobody to call.
The money was a gift to both of us, in both our names, and Craig had spent his own money as much as mine. It was gone. There was nothing to report.
The eighty was different. The eighty was mine alone, and the only thing standing between my father’s ground and a lender in Sioux Falls was my signature.
That pen was the one thing in the whole mess I controlled.
So I sat on the shoulder and I thought about what Daddy would do. Not what he would say, because Daddy didn’t say much.
What he would do. And the answer came to me plain as the road in front of me.
He would plant it.
For three years after Daddy died, Evan’s father, Tom Meyer, rented the eighty.
He paid a fair cash rent, a little under three hundred an acre, and the checks went into our joint account. I realize now some of those checks went to Iowa too.
But Tom had told me back in January he was cutting back. He’d had a stent put in after Christmas, and Julie, his wife, made him promise to drop the rented ground.
He said Evan wanted to start farming on his own. He said, “If you ever want to keep it in the family, so to speak, talk to the boy.”
I hadn’t thought much about it at the time. I figured I would find another renter, the way you do.
Now, sitting on that road shoulder with the mail truck humming, I thought about it a great deal.