“Dad, take them off.” Uncle Keith said it at seven in the morning on the first day of harvest, in front of the whole crew, with the sun barely over the pines and steam coming off the reservoir.
Grandpa stood by the shop door in his old chest waders. They were the same pair he had worn for eleven years, and there was a black patch on the left knee where he had glued them himself at the kitchen table.
“I’m fine, Keith,” Grandpa said. He said it quietly, the way he says everything. “I’ll stay in the shallow end. I’ll work the corners like always.”
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Keith looked at the crew instead of at his father. Rudy, Marcus, Joe and Tina were standing in a loose half circle with their coffee, and every one of them suddenly found something interesting to look at on the ground.
“An 83-year-old in waders is a liability,” Keith said. “I’ve got the crop insurance and the note at the bank riding on this marsh. Anybody who lets him in the water is done here. I mean that.”
Nobody moved. I was standing by my car with Eli and a box of donuts from the bakery in Tomah, because it was a Saturday and Eli had been begging all week to watch the first flood. I wished right then that I had stayed home.
Grandpa did not argue. He did not raise his voice, and he did not look at me for help, which I think is the part that hurt the most.
He just nodded once, like a man who had been handed a bill he expected.
He sat down on the edge of the flatbed, unhooked his suspenders and worked the waders off one leg at a time. It took him a while. His knees are 83 years old too.
When he got them off, he folded them neatly, the way my grandmother used to fold his church pants, and laid them on the flatbed. Then he put his boots back on, tied them, and walked to his truck.
“Grandpa,” I said.
“It’s all right, Molly,” he said, and he touched the brim of his cap to Eli the way he always does. “You stay and watch. It’s a good crop this year. You can see it from the dike.”
Then he drove out the marsh road toward town, and he did not come back. Not the next day, and not the next week. For a month, the man who dug that marsh did not set foot on it.