The Envelope at the Mother Daughter Dance

Why He Did It

I want to be fair to my father, because I have had a long time to think about him and because he is not a cruel man, not in the way people usually mean that word.

He is a proud one, and pride does its own kind of damage.

Lester Haag started out sweeping floors at the Minneapolis-Moline dealer in Madelia in 1962.

By 1979 he had bought it, changed the sign, and put our name on the building. Haag Implement. He sold tractors and combines to half the farms in Watonwan County.

Warren went to work there out of high school and never left. When Dad retired at seventy, Warren took it over.

It is still Haag Implement. Warren still sells the same families their tractors, only now the tractors cost what a house did when we were kids.

I was the one who left. I went to Mankato State, married Tom Lindgren, a farm kid from Lake Crystal who said he did not care whose name went on the mailbox, so we kept mine, and I went into lending.

Dad was proud of me in his way. He just did not count me.

That is the thing I understood about my father long before that wedding. He measured everything against Warren’s side.

Warren’s side kept the name. Warren’s side kept the business. Warren’s side was the family, and the rest of us were relatives.

And Levi worried him. Levi does not own land. He does not own cows. He works for the Kruger family on their dairy, runs their fresh-cow barn, gets up at three-thirty in the morning, and comes home smelling like silage.

To my father, that is a hired man, and a hired man is a man who will never own anything.

I think he truly believed he was making a point that night. I think he thought fifty dollars would say to Natalie, “Look what you are choosing.”

I do not think he thought about how it would land on a twenty-seven-year-old girl on the best day of her life.

But I also do not think it matters very much what he thought. It landed where it landed.