The Notice After the Last Beans

January

On the third Saturday of January, a little after nine in the morning, I looked out Paul’s kitchen window and saw Vern coming across the road on foot again.

This time Judy was walking beside him. She was carrying a manila folder against her chest with both arms, the way you carry something you are afraid the wind will take.

I put the coffee on before they reached the porch.

Nate came in from the shop. Paul came in behind him, saw who was at the table, and said he had something to check on in the barn. He took his coat back off the hook and went out.

So it was the four of us at Paul’s kitchen table, with the coffee and the east window and the snow on the stubble outside.

Vern sat with his cap in his lap. He looked at the table for a while before he said anything.

“Judy made me go to a meeting,” he said finally.

“The Extension office had a farm transition meeting in Princeton in December,” Judy said. “For families. Two evenings. About how to hand down a farm while you’re still alive to see it.”

“There were people there younger than me with it all worked out,” Vern said. “Their kids were partners. On paper. Getting paid. I sat in the back and felt like a fool.”

“You’re not a fool, Dad,” Nate said.

“I was raised to think it was the only way,” Vern said. “Work for nothing and wait for your old man to die. My dad made me wait until I was forty. He didn’t sign one paper until the doctor told him he had a year.”

He turned his cap around in his hands.

“I was angry about that for twenty years,” he said. “And then I went and did the same thing to my own son. And I didn’t even know I was doing it until I stood in Paul’s yard and heard what you were worth.”

Judy opened the folder and slid the papers across the table.

“We had the man at Farm Credit look these over,” she said. “And the Extension lady. It’s not lawyer talk. It’s plain.”

I read it, because reading it is what I do.

Nate a forty percent partner in the operation starting this spring, going to fifty in five years. A wage for Nate of fifty two thousand a year, the same as Paul’s, paid before any partner draw. A wage for me, for the books and the cart.

And the home place, the hundred and sixty acres with the house and the buildings, put in Nate’s name in ten years, on a schedule written right there on page three.

“Not when I die,” Vern said. “In ten years. While I’m still here to watch you farm it.”

Nate didn’t move. I looked at him and he was holding very still the way he does when he is trying not to cry in front of his father.

“There’s one more page,” Judy said quietly.

The last page was a check. Not a big one. Twenty thousand dollars, written out to both of us, in Vern’s own shaky hand.

“That’s not back pay,” Vern said. “I couldn’t ever pay back what I owe you two. That’s for the baby. That’s for a start. Something I should have given you ten years ago.”

I put my hand flat on the table. My hand was shaking.

“Vern,” I said. “Why didn’t you ever ask us what we needed?”

He looked at me straight then, for maybe the first time since October.

“Because nobody ever asked me,” he said. “And I thought that meant you weren’t supposed to.”

Nobody said anything for a while. The coffee pot ticked on the counter.

“We’d have to talk to Paul,” Nate said finally. “He took us in. I’m not walking out on him in January the way I walked out on you in October.”

“I’d expect nothing less,” Vern said. “I’d be ashamed of you if you did.”