The Farmhouse Down the Road

Mary taught me to make apple butter in a copper kettle. I took Esther to the eye doctor in Millersburg when she started squinting at the blackboard at school, and Mary cried in the waiting room when the girl put on her new glasses and could read the eye chart.

I was saving two hundred dollars a month on rent and a hundred a week on child care. For the first time since the divorce, I opened a savings account. I put Ivy’s name and Theo’s name on it.

And every few days, Dad’s dark gray pickup slowed down at the end of my lane and then went on.

Mid-March, the ground thawed. In this part of Ohio, the old-timers say you put your potatoes in around St. Patrick’s Day if the ground will let you.

My mother always did. She’d be out there in her barn coat with a bucket of cut seed and a hoe, even if it spit snow on her.

I had been thinking about a garden all winter. Eli had disked a patch behind the farmhouse for me in the fall, along with his own fields. He’d said, “Every house should have a garden,” and that was the end of it.

On a Saturday morning in the middle of March, I was standing in that patch with a borrowed hoe, trying to remember how my mother had laid out her rows, when I heard a truck coming up the gravel lane. Slow.

Dad’s dark gray pickup. All the way up the lane this time. All the way to the house.

Theo saw it first, from the porch, where he was trying to tie his boots. “Grandpa!” he yelled, and ran down the steps with his laces flapping.

Dad got out of the truck slowly. His knee had been bad all winter. He was wearing the same tan work jacket and cap he’d had on in October.

He bent down and hugged Theo, and then he walked around to the back of the pickup and dropped the tailgate.

He hauled out a burlap sack, a heavy one, maybe fifty pounds. He swung it up on his shoulder the way he used to swing feed sacks when I was a kid, though I saw him wince when it landed.

Then he carried it across the yard to where I stood in the garden patch.

He set it down at my feet. It said Kennebec on the tag. Seed potatoes, the kind my mother always bought from the feed store in Millersburg, the kind that keep all winter in the cellar.

“Your mother always had hers in by now,” Dad said. He took off his cap and turned it in his hands. “I thought maybe you hadn’t got any yet.”

“I hadn’t,” I said.

He looked at the ground. He looked at the Hershbergers’ place and their windmill across the road, and at Theo, who was hanging on his leg. Then he looked at me.

“Darcy,” he said. “Can I help you plant?”

Something in my chest came loose that had been tight since September.

“Yes, Dad,” I said. “I’d like that.”

We didn’t talk about it right away. We cut the seed potatoes first, sitting on overturned buckets by the porch, two or three eyes to a piece, the way Mom taught us both. Dad’s knife was faster than mine. It always had been.

After a while he said, without looking up, “Seth’s been putting checks in my mailbox.”

“I know,” I said.