The Corn Dad Hauled Himself

The concrete pads were still there when I drove into the yard. Three round gray slabs, each one ringed with rusty bolt stubs, and a stack of curved tin sheets loaded on a flatbed trailer beside the machine shed.

I parked crooked by the yard light and sat there with the engine running. I had driven out from the hospital in Kearney to get Dad clean shirts and his reading glasses. I had not come out expecting to see open sky where his bins used to stand.

My brother Randy was standing by the trailer with a man I did not know, a heavy man in brown coveralls holding a cordless impact wrench. Randy had his hands in his jacket pockets. When he saw my car he took them out, then put them back in.

I got out and walked over. The March wind was coming hard across the stubble from the west, the same kind of wind that had blown the lid open on the middle bin six days before and sent Dad up the outside ladder to latch it.

“What is this,” I said.

“They’re sold,” Randy said. “Fourteen thousand for the three of them. He’s taking the last of the tin today.”

The man in coveralls looked at me, then at Randy, and decided he had something that needed doing on the far side of the trailer.

“Dad doesn’t know,” I said. It was not a question. Dad had been in a hospital bed for six days with two cracked ribs, a broken left wrist, and a cut over his eyebrow that took eleven stitches. He had not been off the third floor.

“I’ll tell him,” Randy said. “Tammy, a man of 81 has no business farming. Somebody in this family had to finally say it out loud.”

“So you said it with a wrench.”

He looked at the slabs instead of me. “He’d have climbed them again. You know he would have. The first windy day, he’d have been right back up there.”

I wanted to say a dozen things. I did not say any of them. I am forty-seven years old and I have learned that the things I want to say in the first minute are usually the things I spend a year being sorry for.

I went in the house. Dad’s glasses were on the kitchen table next to his Bible and a seed corn calendar still turned to February. I packed a grocery sack with clean flannel shirts and his good slippers and drove back to Kearney with both hands tight on the wheel.