The Notice After the Last Beans

The single-wide

We lived in a 1986 single-wide parked beside the machine shed, close enough that I could hear the air compressor kick on from our bed.

It had been put there for a hired man in the eighties, back when Vern’s father still ran the place and still hired men. Nobody had lived in it for years before we did.

Nate and I moved in the spring we got married. I was twenty two. He was twenty four and had just come home from two years at the junior college in Oglesby with an ag degree and a lot of ideas.

Vern offered us eighteen thousand a year between the two of us, the trailer, the electric and the propane, and half a beef every fall. It sounded like a start.

It stayed eighteen thousand. Fifteen hundred dollars a month, for the two of us, for ten years. It never went up a dollar.

I want to be fair about what that bought. We never paid rent. We never paid for propane. We ate a lot of good beef. I know families in this county who would trade with us.

But I also know what a hired man makes in north central Illinois. Paul Engstrom’s last hired man had made forty eight thousand and a house, and he was one man.

Nate and I were two. Nate ran the planter and the sprayer and the combine and fixed everything with a motor. I ran the grain cart every fall and kept every book, every seed order, every insurance claim.

Twelve hundred acres. Corn and beans, the way everybody around Princeton farms. Vern ran the combine when his shoulder let him and the semi when it didn’t.

That night in June I sat on the couch in the single-wide with my feet tucked up and told Nate the number.

He was eating cereal at the counter because it was ten o’clock and he had been spraying until dark. He set the bowl down.

“Sixty,” he said.

“Sixty thousand two hundred.”

“From the corn.”

“Fourteen thousand bushels of it.”

He did not say anything for a long time. He was not a man who said things fast. He had his father’s way of looking at the floor while he thought.

“In March he said there was no money,” Nate said finally.

“I know. I was there.”

“I know you were.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I’m not mad at Tiff, Holly. I want you to know that. She didn’t set the price on anything.”

“I’m not mad at Tiffany either,” I said. And I meant it. Tiffany was twenty nine and had waited a long time for Kyle to ask, and she deserved a nice day.

What I was mad about was simpler than that, and harder. Nobody in that house had ever thought of us as people who needed to be paid.

The wedding

The wedding was the first Saturday in August. It was ninety one degrees and the corn was tasseled out all around the Henderson barn, and it was beautiful. I will say that plainly. It was beautiful.

Tiffany wore her grandmother’s veil. Kyle cried at the end of the aisle. The band from Peoria played until eleven and the lights hung in the rafters like stars.

Judy found me by the dessert table around nine. She had a glass of punch in one hand and her shoes in the other.

“Isn’t it something,” she said.

“It’s lovely, Judy. She looks so happy.”

“She only gets married once.” Judy looked out over the floor where Vern was dancing with Tiffany, stiff and careful the way he did everything. “I wanted her to have what I didn’t.”

Judy and Vern had been married in the church basement in 1983 with cake and mints and a borrowed record player. She had told me that story more than once.

I understood it. I did. A mother wanting more for her daughter is about the oldest thing there is.

I just stood there and thought about our blower motor on the kitchen floor at two in the morning.

Later Vern came over to get a cup of coffee. He was sweating through his good shirt and he looked happier than I had seen him in years.

“Your mother wanted this for her,” he said to Nate, who was standing beside me. “That was hers to give. I don’t tell your mother no.”

He meant it kindly. He meant it as an explanation. Nate nodded and said it was a fine party, Dad, and his father clapped him on the shoulder and went back out to the floor.

Nate and I danced one slow song. He held me a little tighter than usual.

“I’m going to fix this,” he said into my hair.

“How?”

“I don’t know yet.”