The Corn Dad Hauled Himself

Why I did not call anybody

People ask me why I did not do something about it. Call the sheriff. Get the bins back. Make Randy pay.

The answer is simple, even if it is not satisfying. The bins were torn down and hauled off to a scrap yard in Hastings before Dad ever got home. There was nothing left to get back. The man who bought them had paid cash to the owner’s son, and as far as he knew, that was that.

And Dad would not hear of it. I asked him once, in that first week, whether he wanted me to talk to somebody about what Randy had done.

“He’s my son,” Dad said. He did not raise his voice. He did not need to. “Nobody is calling anybody about my son.”

So that was the end of that. I could not unsell those bins. But I could do something else, and it took me most of April to work out what.

The kitchen table

What scared me was not the bins. It was the forty acres.

About two weeks after he came home, Dad called the Hester boys and told them to go ahead and take his last forty too, starting this spring. Just like that. Forty-five years of planting his own ground, and he gave it away over the phone in two minutes.

I found out from Gail Hester at church. She said it kindly, the way you mention that somebody has been in the hospital. She said, “Your dad’s finally slowing down, isn’t he? The boys were glad to get it.”

I sat through the rest of the service and did not hear a word of it. When we stood for the last hymn, it was “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come,” which was out of season and which was my mother’s favorite, and Dad stood next to me in the pew and did not sing.

He always sang that one. He sang it badly and loud, the way farmers do.

That night I sat at my own kitchen table with my husband, Hollis, and I cried in a way I had not let myself cry at the hospital.

“He’s quitting,” I said. “Not farming. Everything. He’s sitting in that kitchen waiting to die.”

Hollis is a seed salesman. He has been in a thousand farm kitchens, and he knows the look of a man who has stopped planning for spring. He did not tell me I was wrong. He got up and put the coffee on, which is what Hollis does when he is thinking.

“What he lost wasn’t the bins,” Hollis said finally. “It was the reason to get up. Randy took his ladder, but he also took his crop.”

“I can’t give him the bins back.”

“No.” Hollis sat down across from me and turned his coffee cup in a slow circle. “But we’ve got twenty acres of brome out back that I’ve been meaning to break up for three years.”