The Spring I Planted Daddy’s Ground
“I know that too.”
“You’ll have to tell your mother,” I said. “I’m not going to keep it a secret for you. I’m done keeping things.”
He nodded. His jaw was tight. Craig’s mother is eighty-one and thinks the sun rises on him, and I knew that conversation would be the hardest one of his life. But he nodded.
Evan had come down the field by then, slow, the way you’d walk up to a spooked horse.
He stopped a polite distance away and took off Daddy’s cap and held it in his hands.
“Craig,” he said.
“Evan.”
They looked at each other a minute, the forty-seven-year-old man in the polo shirt and the nineteen-year-old boy in my father’s cap. Then Craig said something I didn’t expect.
“Your dad still selling seed on the side?”
“Yes sir. Pioneer and some of the off-brands. He does it out of our shop.”
“He can’t be lifting bags with that stent,” Craig said. “Who’s hauling for him this spring?”
Evan shrugged. “Me, mostly, when I’m not here.”
“I’ve got Saturdays off,” Craig said. “And I’ve got a pickup and a strong back, and I owe this family more than I’m ever going to be able to pay. Ask your dad if he could use somebody to haul for him on Saturdays. He doesn’t have to pay me much.”
Evan looked at me. I didn’t say anything one way or the other. It wasn’t mine to say.
“I’ll ask him,” Evan said.
We finished the eighty at nine twenty that night, by the tractor lights. Craig didn’t go back to work, and he didn’t go home either.
He sat on the tailgate all afternoon, and when Evan needed bags carried up to the planter, Craig carried them.
He didn’t try to drive. He didn’t give advice. He just carried seed bags in his work shoes and his good khakis until both of them were ruined with black dirt, and when Evan told him to stack the empties a certain way, he stacked them that way.
Then at six thirty he got in his pickup and drove to Sioux Falls for his meeting.
He came back at a quarter after nine and parked on the approach with his headlights on the field so I could see the last pass better.
I made the last turn at the end of the field and lifted the planter, and the old 1086 idled there in the dark with the lights shining out over eighty acres of planted ground.
I sat in Daddy’s seat for a minute and just breathed.
When I climbed down, Evan was waiting at the tractor step. He took off the cap and held it out to me, the way he’d tried to that morning.
“Somebody in his family planted it,” he said. “That was the deal.”
This time I took it. It was warm from his head and stiff with sweat and dust, and it smelled like Daddy, or I imagined it did.
I put it on. It came down over my ears.
Then I took it off again and put it back on Evan’s head and pulled the bill down myself.
“Next year it’s yours to plant,” I said. “I’ll still own it. But I’m a mail carrier, Evan, and you’re a farmer. Daddy knew it before anybody. You keep the cap.”