The Rent Mom Wrote on a Napkin

“Your dad’s rows were never this straight,” she said. “He’d have hated this. He was proud of his crooked rows. Said a straight row meant you weren’t paying attention to the ground.”

Behind me Kathy laughed. Cheryl did too.

“Remember the year he planted the whole east forty with the marker up,” Cheryl said. “And the rows went every which way. And Grandpa drove by on his way to town and stopped the car in the road and just stared.”

“Your grandfather never let him forget it,” Mom said.

“And the year he got the tractor stuck in the creek,” Kathy said. “And had to call the Hrubys, and old Mr. Hruby pulled him out with a team of horses because he wanted to make a point.”

“That was 1981,” Mom said. “Your dad didn’t speak to Ed Hruby until Christmas.”

We sat on that rise for maybe half an hour, with the engine off and the windows down, and my sisters told stories about our dad that I had either forgotten or never known. I was the baby. They had a few years on me, and they remembered things I didn’t.

They remembered him singing in the truck. I never heard him sing. By the time I was old enough to ride along he had stopped, they said, when the farm crisis hit in ’84 and he lost the half section to the bank.

I did not know that. I knew we had lost ground in the eighties. I did not know he had stopped singing.

“He started again,” Mom said quietly. “In about 1990. When Marvin started helping in the field. He sang low, under the engine, with Marvin beside him in the cab. You couldn’t hear it over the tractor, honey, but he did.”

I had to look out my window for a while after that.

We drove the whole quarter. Down along the creek, where the beaver had been at the cottonwoods again. Back up the west side past the waterway Dad put in with the county’s help in 1997. Along the south fence where the deer cross.

Mom had me stop four more times. Once to look at a hawk on a fence post. Once to look at the low spot that always drowns out in a wet spring, and to tell me I should tile it, which she has told me every spring for twenty years.

Once at the corner where Dad’s mailbox used to be, before the county moved the road. Nobody said anything about that stop. We just sat.

And once at the top of the last rise before the house, where you can see the farmhouse and the windbreak and the shop and the old barn all together.

“There it is,” Mom said. “All of it. Thank you, Marvin.”

“You’re welcome, Mom. That’s one.”

“That’s one,” she agreed.

When we pulled back into the yard, Jim was asleep in the Buick with the radio still on, playing the polka hour out of Columbus. Cheryl went and woke him gently and he blinked and smiled at her.

“How was it,” he said.

“The rows are straight,” Cheryl said. “Dad would have hated them.”

Jim laughed. Mom laughed too, out on the porch steps, with one hand on the rail.

Cheryl helped Mom up the steps and into the house. Kathy stood beside me by the pickup a minute.

“Marvin,” she said. “I want you to know something.”

“Okay.”

“I was never going to make you pay it. Even if Mom had said you owed it. I’d have torn it up. I just couldn’t tell Cheryl no. I’ve never been able to tell Cheryl no.”