The Spring I Planted Daddy’s Ground
He had been in a back booth since five, because he hadn’t slept, and he didn’t want to be in the house when I left.
We were in the field by six fifteen. Evan pulled the pickup up to the field approach and started hauling seed bags off the back, and I unfolded the planter at the end of the first row the way he showed me the Saturday before.
It was a cool morning, still and clear, and the sun came up red behind the shelterbelt.
The black dirt was worked up fine and soft, and it smelled the way that dirt always smelled when I was a girl, like rain and iron and something I never had a name for.
Evan climbed up on the planter frame with a bag of seed on his shoulder and started filling the row boxes, one after the other, all twelve.
He worked fast and careful, tipping each bag so the seed ran in smooth without spilling.
When he got to the last box he jumped down and came over to the tractor step. That was when I saw the cap up close in the daylight.
It was faded nearly white at the crown, and the bill had a crease in it from being folded into a back pocket.
It was Daddy’s. I knew it the way you know your own handwriting. I’d seen that crease every planting season of my life.
“Where did you get that?” I asked.
Evan took it off and turned it over in his hands, like he was worried I’d want it back. His hair was flat with sweat already.
“Harold gave it to me,” he said. “The last spring he was out here, before he went in the hospital. He’d had a bad day with his knees and he couldn’t climb up. So I drove, and he sat on the tailgate and watched me plant the whole east half.”
He looked out at the field.
“When I got done he called me over. He took off his cap and put it on my head and said, ‘You keep that until somebody in my family plants this ground again. Then you give it back.'”
Evan held the cap out to me.
I couldn’t take it. I tried to say something and nothing came out.
I stood on the tractor step in my flannel shirt and Daddy’s old work gloves, and I cried harder than I had cried at his funeral.
Evan didn’t say anything. He just stood there beside the tractor holding the cap and waited, the way Daddy said he did. He listened.
After a while I wiped my face with the back of my glove and got a smear of dirt across my cheek doing it.
“You wear it,” I told him. “Daddy would want it out here working. You can give it back to me when we’re done.”
He put it back on and pulled the bill down. “Yes ma’am.”
Then we planted.
Eighty acres with a twelve-row planter is a long day, longer with an old tractor and one person filling boxes.
Every two and a half acres or so, a bag of seed is gone, and by the time we got into a rhythm I figured we’d be lucky to finish before dark.