The Spring I Planted Daddy’s Ground
That night I called Evan. He picked up on the second ring, the way young people never do unless they’re expecting you.
“Evan, it’s Dana Pruess. Harold’s girl.”
“Hi, Dana.” There was a pause. “Dad said you might call.”
“Can Daddy’s old tractor still pull his planter?”
He didn’t laugh, and he didn’t ask me why. That was the thing about Evan. He thought about it first.
“The 1086 runs good,” he said. “I changed the oil in March. Dad kept her in our shed since the sale, and I keep her greased. The planter needs a couple of new disc openers, but I can have those on by the weekend.”
“I want to plant the eighty myself this year,” I said.
“With you. My ground and Daddy’s machinery, your know-how, and we split the crop down the middle. Would you do that with me?”
There was a long quiet on the line. I thought maybe he was trying to find a polite way to say no to a forty-five-year-old mail carrier who hadn’t run a planter since high school.
“Yes ma’am,” he said. “I’d like that a lot.”
Craig found out about the planting from Tom Meyer, of all people, at the gas station in town.
He came home that night and stood in the doorway of the kitchen with his keys still in his hand.
“You’re going to farm it,” he said. “You.”
“Evan and I are.”
“Dana, you deliver mail.” He wasn’t yelling. Craig never yelled. He just sounded tired and a little bit sorry for me.
“You know what seed costs? You know what fertilizer costs? You’re going to sink money into dirt when we could have a hundred thousand dollars working for us.”
“It isn’t working for us, Craig. It’s working for a man in a gas station in Iowa.”
He flinched at that, and I was sorry I’d said it the way I said it. But I didn’t take it back.
I had already been to the co-op. The anhydrous was already on, Tom had put it down in the fall the way he always did, and the agronomist there, a young woman named Kim who’d gone to school with my cousin, worked out the rest with me at the counter.
Thirty-two bags of seed corn for eighty acres, at about thirty-two thousand seeds an acre.
A little under ten thousand dollars, which the co-op would carry on account until harvest, in my name only. I signed for it with my own pen.
I also went to the bank and moved my paycheck into an account with only my name on it. I left Craig the joint account.
There wasn’t anything in it to fight over anyway, and I wasn’t trying to punish him. I was trying to keep the lights on.
Craig slept on the couch most of that month. He didn’t go to Iowa that I knew of. He didn’t do much of anything.
He went to the lot his three days, and the other four he sat in the living room with the television on and the sound off.
I’d come in from my route and he’d be in the same spot. Sometimes he’d look at me like he wanted to say something, and then he’d look back at the screen.
I want to be honest that I didn’t reach for him much those weeks. I was hurt in a way I didn’t have words for.