The Buddy Seat I Gave My Granddaughter

What Troy Said

I should tell you about Troy, because I do not want you thinking he is a monster. He is not.

He married my daughter Kim nine years ago. He has been a decent husband to her and a steady provider, and he works harder than any two men I know.

He grew up on a farm over by Rochelle where his daddy ran things a certain way. On that farm the combine was where the men were and the kitchen was where the women were.

Nobody ever said it out loud, because nobody ever thought to question it.

So when Troy says the buddy seat is a boy thing, he is not inventing meanness. He is repeating something. It is the way you repeat a hymn you learned so long ago you forget you are singing it.

The trouble is that Ava is the only child Kim and Troy have. She loves that farm the way I loved it when I was her age.

And nobody was planning to pass it down to her, because of a notion.

I knew if I made a scene in the yard it would turn into a fight between me and my son-in-law. Kim would be caught in the middle. Ava would learn that the farm was a thing grown-ups yelled about instead of a thing you loved.

My late husband Dale used to say you do not win a stubborn man with your mouth. You win him with the work.

You do the thing right in front of him until he cannot argue with what his own eyes are telling him.

Dale has been gone four years now. The heart attack took him in the hog lot in March, fast, before the ambulance could get out the county road.

I run the north eighty myself now. It is the ground that came down to me from my own father. I kept Dale’s old combine because I could not stand to sell it.

It is a green machine, a John Deere, not the newest one but a good one. I grease it and I run it, and every fall I take off my own corn without asking any man for a thing.

I am not a big woman and it is not a small machine. People in town still look twice when they see me climb out of that cab in my chore coat.

I quit minding that years ago. Dale is the one who taught me, and when he went, running his combine was one way I kept him close.

Troy harvests the big home place with Kim and his brother. I harvest mine. We help each other at the edges, and most years that is a fine arrangement.

This was not going to be most years.