The Supper for Dad’s Hired Man

What Clem asked me

I went back to the little house the next morning before work.

Clem was already up, already dressed, sitting at the table with nothing to do for the first time in thirty-one years. It was the saddest thing I have ever seen in a kitchen.

“I could talk to a lawyer,” I said. “I could go to Dad. I could make some noise about this.”

He shook his head before I finished. “Your dad’s got enough to fight. And your brother’s doing what he thinks is right. I won’t be the reason the two of you don’t speak at Christmas.”

“Clem.”

“Marnie.” He said my name the way he used to say “easy” on the drawbar. “Don’t make a family fight out of me. I’m asking you.”

So I did not. That is the answer, if you are wondering why I did not just call somebody.

It was Garrick’s call to make, and Clem asked me not to fight it. I could not fix it. But I could give him work.

The eighty

My mother left me eighty acres when she died. It is a long, flat piece two miles west of the home place, good black ground, tiled in the seventies.

Her father bought it in 1951. It was the only thing she owned in her own name.

A neighbor named Arlis Haverkamp had cash rented it for eleven years.

Arlis turned seventy-four last fall and told me at Thanksgiving that this would be his last crop. He sold his good equipment at a consignment auction in February.

I had been meaning to find a new renter. I had two offers on the kitchen counter, both fair. I had not called either one back because of Dad.

I sat in my car in the dental office lot that morning and looked at those two numbers in my head. Then I called Arlis.

“Did you sell the old planter?” I said.

“The John Deere eight-row? Nobody’d bid on it.” He laughed. “Or the 4440. I kept them for the grandkids to look at, I guess.”

“Would you let them out for a season? To Clem Brekke? I’d pay you rent on them.”

There was a pause on the line. Arlis is a man who knows everything that happens on every section road in that township. “Garrick let him go,” he said. It was not a question.

“Yes.”

“You keep your rent money,” Arlis said. “Tell Clem the tractor wants its fuel filter changed before he takes it out. And tell him I said it’s about time somebody used it right.”