The Envelopes in My Father’s Bible

I was eleven when Scott started working for us. I mostly remember him as the tall quiet boy who ate three plates of my mother’s hotdish at harvest and called my father “sir” long after he married me and had every right to call him Elmer.

Dad sold the cows when he was sixty-five. His knees were gone and so was the milk price.

He put most of the sale money in a savings account at the bank in town and called it his cushion. Mom had passed by then, and the cushion was all he had besides his Social Security.

Two springs before the divorce, Scott’s old tractor threw a rod in the middle of planting.

He found a used one at a dealer over by Rochester, a good one with a cab, but the bank was already carrying our operating note and would not stretch it any further.

He went to my father. I didn’t know until afterward. Dad wrote him a check for eleven thousand dollars at his own kitchen table and told him to pay it back when he could.

No interest. No paper. A handshake, and a cup of coffee.

“He’s family,” Dad told me when I found out. “And he’s the best hand I ever had. He’ll make it right when he can. You wait and see.”

Scott made two payments that first fall, two hundred dollars each, and Dad sent both checks right back to him in the mail. “Pay me when it’s real money,” he wrote on a card. Then the bean price dropped, and the rent on the Olson ground went up, and the payments never started again.

The year it came apart

I won’t spend long on the divorce. We stopped talking somewhere in the third bad year.

He came in late from the field, and I sat in the kitchen with the ledgers and a cold supper.

I asked him to see the pastor with me. He said he didn’t need anybody telling him how to run his house.

I asked him to see a counselor in La Crosse. He said we couldn’t afford gas to La Crosse, which was not true, and we both knew it.

In September, after the beans came off thin, he sat down across from me and said he couldn’t do it anymore.

He said it to the table, not to me. Then he called a lawyer in Caledonia the next week.

I want to be clear about this part, because it matters later. I did not walk out. Scott asked for the divorce, and Scott filed.

I moved out of the house because the house sat on his family’s ground and there was no world where I kept it.

We went through mediation in January, in a small room at the courthouse with a heater that ticked.

His lawyer had a list. On the list, under debts, was a line that said loan from Elmer Dahl, eleven thousand dollars, tractor.

“That’s a loan from your family,” the mediator said to me, kindly enough. “Mr. Hartwig keeps the house and carries the mortgage and the operating note. Would you be willing to take the family loan on your side of the ledger?”

I looked at Scott. He was looking at the table again. I could have argued. I could have said the tractor was sitting in his shed and the loan was his.

But I was tired, and it was my father, and I thought a man who had milked cows beside Elmer Dahl would at least tell people the truth.

“Fine,” I said. “I’ll take it. Put it on my side.”

So the decree put Scott’s tractor loan on my side of the page. Twelve pages, signed by the judge in February, and that one line was the only one I ever read twice.

People always ask why I didn’t go back to court over it. The answer is simple.

The debt landed on me in the decree, and I would rather pay my own father than spend a year and thousands of dollars arguing about it with a man I used to love.