The Supper for Dad’s Hired Man

The offer

I drove out to the little house the next Sunday after church. Ansel came with me.

He wanted to, and I wanted him there, because I knew Clem would turn me down if he thought it was charity and might not turn down a man.

My husband is not a talker either. He has driven a grain truck and then a feed truck for the co-op for nineteen years.

He knows every bin site and every farmer from Sheldon to Hospers by the color of their mailbox.

Clem was on his front step with his coffee. It was cold, and he had his chore coat on over his good church shirt.

“I’ve got eighty acres and no renter,” I said. “I can’t pay you what Dad paid. It’s part-time work. Arlis is lending his 4440 and his eight-row planter. The custom guys can combine it in the fall.”

“I didn’t ask you for anything,” Clem said.

“I know you didn’t.”

“I don’t want to be somebody’s project.”

“You’re not,” Ansel said. He leaned on the porch rail. “You’re the only man in this county who knows which side of that eighty stays wet in May. We need you more than you need us. Somebody’s got to keep me from getting the truck stuck.”

Clem looked at him a long time. Then he looked down into his coffee. “What’s the seed?” he said.

We settled it at his table. Twenty dollars an hour for the hours he put in, the fuel and inputs on me, and he would tell me what I was doing wrong.

He wrote it down on the back of an envelope in his careful hand and we both signed it, though neither of us needed to.

Spring

Clem changed the fuel filter on the 4440 the next Saturday, and the hydraulic filter while he was at it, and greased every zerk on Arlis’s planter.

He found two worn seed disks and a bad parallel arm and fixed them with parts out of his own pocket. He would not let me pay him back.

Ansel hauled seed on his days off. He backed the co-op’s tender up to the planter like he had been doing it his whole life, which he had, just never for us.

My oldest boy, who is sixteen, rode along in the cab two evenings. He came home and told me Clem had not said ten words in four hours and it was the best night of his life.

Clem had my eighty planted to corn by the tenth of May. It came up in rows so straight Arlis drove by twice to look at it.

The custom operator Garrick hired for the home place did not get there until the eighteenth.

He planted Dad’s ground in one long day and night, and the rows along the creek side hill wandered like a dog tracking a rabbit. Everybody on the road could see it.

I did not say a word about it. Not to Garrick. Not to anybody.