The Widow Who Planted Across the Road
“We bought the Wiebe place,” I said. “The house across the road, and the eighty acres with it.”
She sat straight up. “We did?”
“We did. We’re going to farm it. You and me.”
“Do you know how?”
I laughed, which I had not done in five weeks.
“I drove grain cart for your dad for nineteen harvests. I grew up on a farm outside Blue Hill. Your grandpa had me on a tractor when I was younger than you. I know how.”
“Why there?” she said. “Why not in town, like everybody thinks?”
“Because your dad’s fields are on the other side of that road,” I said. “I want you to be able to wake up and see them. I want you to be able to count the passes.”
She did not say anything. She just leaned forward and put her forehead against my shoulder and stayed there a long time.
We moved across the road the last week of April.
My sister came with her husband and their stock trailer, and two men from church came with a flatbed, and we carried twenty years of a marriage across a gravel road in a single afternoon.
Randy’s wife, Lori, came over while we were carrying the last boxes out of the kitchen. She stood on the back step in her barn coat and did not come in.
Lori and I had been sisters-in-law for twenty-one years. We had canned tomatoes together every August.
“Randy says you bought the Wiebe place,” she said.
“I did.”
“He didn’t know,” she said. “He found out from Dale Kroeker at the elevator.” She looked at the empty kitchen, at the bare nail where the calendar had hung.
“Melissa, I told him the funeral was the wrong day. I want you to know that. I told him.”
“I know you did,” I said. I did not, but I believed her.
She turned to go, and then she stopped. “Jeff’s seed cap is still on the hook,” she said, and pointed. “By the door. You don’t want to leave that.”
I had missed it. It was the green cap with the yellow deer on the front, the one he wore every spring, and it had hung on that same nail every night of our marriage.
Abby took it off the hook before I could reach it.
She put it on. It came down over her ears and sat on top of her eyebrows. She pushed it back with one finger and looked at me, daring me to say something.
I did not say anything. I could not have.
The first week of May came in warm and dry, and the ground was fit.
On Wednesday morning I heard Randy’s tractor fire up in the yard across the road, and by seven they were pulling the big planter out onto Jeff’s ground, the half section that ran along the road on the east side.
I had been up since four. I had the 6420 greased and fueled, the planter boxes loaded, the seed plates set, the markers checked twice.
At seven I pulled out of the Wiebe yard and turned onto my own field, on the west side of the same gravel road.
I would like to tell you somebody waved. Nobody waved.