The Widow Who Planted Across the Road
I could see Randy standing by his pickup at the edge of their field with a coffee cup, and I saw him see me, and then he turned around and looked the other way.
It was not easy. I had planted plenty of fields with Jeff, riding with him, running the end rows when he wanted a sandwich, but I had never planted a whole farm by myself. The tractor pulled to the left.
The number six row unit kept dropping doubles until I stopped and found a bent finger on the seed plate.
I lost forty minutes filling boxes by hand because I did not own a seed tender, and every refill meant hauling fifty-pound bags off the trailer and lifting them over my head into the hopper.
Abby rode with me all day. She sat in the buddy seat in Jeff’s cap with a thermos of lemonade between her feet and a book she never opened.
Every time we turned at the end of a pass, she put one hand up on top of her head to keep the cap from sliding off.
“Dad let me ride when I was little,” she said somewhere in the afternoon. “I always had to hold the cap on at the turns. He said if it fell off, the corn wouldn’t come up.”
“That’s not true,” I said.
“I know,” she said. “I hold it on anyway.”
By late afternoon, I had stopped at the edge of the field to load the boxes again.
I was standing beside the green tractor in my ball cap and canvas chore coat with a paper seed sack in my hands, the little white farmhouse behind me, and Abby was up in the cab, and across the road their tractor was making its passes, the dust drifting behind it in the low sun.
Scott was driving it. Randy and Luke had walked out to the edge of their field and were standing there, side by side, not talking, watching me lift that sack.
I did not look at them for long. I lifted the bag and poured it, and lifted the next one, and got back in the cab.
I planted maybe twenty acres that first day. Jeff would have done sixty, easy.
When I finally shut the tractor off at dark, my hands were shaking and my shoulders burned so bad I could not lift a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator.
Abby made us scrambled eggs, burned on one side. Then she went to the bathroom cupboard and came back with the jar of liniment her dad had kept for his bad knee, and she stood behind my chair and rubbed it into my shoulders with her small hands until the whole kitchen smelled like wintergreen.
“Is this how he did it?” she said.
“Just like that,” I said, and I put my face down on the kitchen table so she would not see it.
That night I went back out in the dark and filled the boxes again under the yard light, so I would be ready at daylight.
I was tired enough that I sat down on the planter hitch afterward and fell asleep for a minute with my back against the tractor tire.