The Supper for Dad’s Hired Man

Dad

Dad was in his recliner when I got there, with the TV on mute and the farm report scrolling across the bottom. I sat on the footstool and told him about the supper.

He listened all the way through. Then he worked on something for a long time. I could see it, behind his eyes, the words lining up and refusing to come.

“Coat,” he said finally. “Brown coat.”

His brown corduroy sport coat. The one he wore to every funeral and every wedding and every 4-H show for twenty years. It was hanging in the back closet with the elbows worn shiny.

“You want to wear your brown coat?” I said.

He nodded. Then he lifted his good hand and tapped his own chest, twice. “Me,” he said. “Say. Something.”

I did not know what to say. Dad had not made a speech since February. He could barely get through the table prayer.

The speech therapist said he was doing well, but well meant three or four words at a time.

“You don’t have to, Dad.”

He looked at me with the look he used to give me when I was fifteen and wanted to skip chores. “Me,” he said again. And that was the end of it.

Garrick

I called my brother the next day. I want to say that, because people later asked if I had sprung the whole thing on him. I did not.

“I’m throwing Clem a supper at the co-op,” I said. “Saturday the thirteenth. Dad’s coming. I’d like you to come too.”

There was a long silence. I could hear his office phone ringing in the background.

“Is this about me?” he said.

“No. It’s about Clem.”

“Everybody in this county is going to know I let him go.”

“Everybody in this county already knows, Garrick. That’s how a county works.” I said it gently. “I’m not going to say anything about it. Nobody’s going to make a speech. It’s roast beef and bars. Come eat.”

“I’ll see,” he said, and hung up.

I sat with the phone in my lap and prayed a little, the way my mother used to pray over the bread dough, not asking for anything in particular. Just setting it in front of God and leaving it there.

Saturday

It rained Friday night and cleared off by noon Saturday, which every farmer in northwest Iowa will tell you is the best kind of June day there is. Too wet to spray. Nothing to do but go to town.

Ansel and our boys set up the folding tables at three. Long rows of them, end to end, in that plain room with the drop ceiling and the seed company calendar on the wall.

Inez’s crew had the roasters going in the little kitchen by four.

I put the head table up front, under the window. Just a folding table like the others with a white paper cloth on it.

Dad in the middle. Clem on his left, where he could reach Dad’s plate.

At a quarter to six, I counted the chairs. We had set seventy-five. Ansel looked out the front door at the parking lot and came back with a funny look on his face.

“You’d better ask Elden for the rest of the chairs,” he said.

They kept coming. Pickups, mostly, and a few cars, parking along the gravel shoulder of the highway when the lot filled up.

Men in seed caps and work jackets with their wives. Old men I had not seen since my mother’s funeral. Young men Clem had taught to weld in Dad’s shop.

The Haverkamps came. Arlis wore a tie. Twila brought two pans of scotcheroos, which was not on the plan, and Inez did not say a word about it because they were scotcheroos.

The co-op guys came, the ones who had loaded Dad’s grain for thirty years and knew Clem’s voice on the scale house intercom. The vet came.

The seed dealer came. The pastor from our church came and the pastor from Clem’s church came, and they stood together by the coffee urn talking about the rain.

By six fifteen we had a hundred and fifty people in that room and Elden was hauling chairs out of the storage closet two at a time.