The Spring I Planted Daddy’s Ground
I drove and Evan watched the monitor at the end of each pass, and every hour or so he’d wave me down and fill the boxes again.
I learned to line up the marker on the last pass without drifting. By the fourth round my rows were as straight as his.
Daddy used to say you could tell a farmer’s character by his rows. I don’t know about that.
But I know that every time I turned at the end and looked back and saw those straight lines in the black dirt, something in my chest came a little looser.
A couple of pickups slowed on the gravel road and then went on. One of them stopped.
It was Tom Meyer, who wasn’t supposed to be doing anything with his heart, and he stood at the fence for ten minutes with his hands in his jacket pockets and then drove away again.
Later Evan told me his dad had called him. “Your rows look good,” Tom had said. “Tell Dana hers do too.”
Then, Evan said, his dad had to hang up because he was getting choked up and didn’t want anybody to know.
By a little before eleven we had about thirty-five acres in.
I had just stopped for a fill and was standing on the tractor step, when Evan, up at the planter boxes with a seed bag on his shoulder, pointed toward the field road.
“Dana.”
I looked. Craig was standing at the end of the row.
He was in his polo shirt from the lot, the one with the stitching on the pocket, and his good khakis, and he was standing at the edge of the black dirt in his work shoes like he wasn’t sure he was allowed to step onto it. He was holding a brown paper sack.
He should have been at the lot an hour ago. I knew his schedule. Tuesdays he opened.
I shut the tractor down and climbed off the step. My legs were stiff from four hours in the seat.
I pulled off my gloves and then I put them back on, because I didn’t know what to do with my hands.
Craig didn’t move. He just stood there at the end of the row and waited for me.
I walked the whole length of that pass to get to him, a quarter mile of fresh planted dirt, with Evan watching from the planter and the sun warm on the back of my neck.
I could see his face better the closer I got. His eyes were red. He hadn’t shaved.
When I got there he held the sack out to me with both hands.
“I made you some sandwiches,” he said. “Ham and cheese. The kind your dad liked, with the mustard.”
I took the sack. It was still cold from our refrigerator.
“I saw you go past the coffee shop this morning,” he said. “I was sitting in the back. And I need to tell you what I did after.”
His pickup was parked down on the field approach, just past where Evan had the seed.
We walked down to it without saying anything, and Craig let the tailgate down, and we sat on it the way Daddy and I used to sit on his to eat lunch when I was a girl.