The Supper for Dad’s Hired Man

The room

Then Dad lifted the mug up as high as his good arm would go, and he held it there.

And the room stood up.

It started at the front, with Arlis and Twila, and went back table by table. Chairs scraping on the tile.

A hundred and fifty people in seed caps and work jackets and church dresses rising to their feet in that plain co-op room, with their paper cups lifted, not saying anything at all.

Clem did not let go of Dad’s elbow. He stood there with his mustache working and his eyes on the back wall, and his face did a thing I had never seen it do in thirty-one years.

I was the only one in the room still sitting. I could not get up.

I sat at that folding table in my green sweater looking up at my father and I could not see him for crying.

At the back, by the coffee urn, my brother was standing too. He had set his cup down. He had both hands at his sides.

After

Dad sat down. Clem eased him into the chair and then sat down himself, hard, like his knees had quit. Dad patted his arm twice with his good hand. Neither one of them said anything.

People came up to the head table after that. Not a line this time. Just a slow, steady crowd, men shaking Dad’s good hand and then Clem’s.

Old women kissing Dad on the cheek. A young man I did not know told Clem he still had the welding rod Clem gave him in 2004.

I did not see Garrick come up. I just looked over, at some point, and he was standing at the end of the head table with his hands in his pockets.

He waited until the people around Clem thinned out. Then he stepped in close. I was near enough to hear, and I want to tell you exactly what he said, because it is the whole thing.

“Clem,” my brother said. He cleared his throat. “The custom guy messed up the planting on the creek side. You’ve seen it.”

“I’ve seen it,” Clem said.

“I was going to put Dad’s planter on the consignment sale in July. I don’t know if it’s worth fixing or what’s wrong with it.” Garrick looked at the floor and then back up. “Would you come out sometime this week and look at it? Before I go and sell something I don’t understand?”

Clem did not answer right away. He looked at Garrick a long time, the way he had looked at Ansel on his porch in April.

“Tuesday,” Clem said. “If it’s dry.”

“Tuesday,” Garrick said. He held out his hand. Clem shook it.

That was all. Nobody in that room made a speech about it. Nobody clapped.

But I saw Smitty see it, and Arlis see it, and Elmer Wiersma at the first table nod his head once, slow, like a man signing a check.

The planter

Clem went out to the home place that Tuesday. Garrick took the afternoon off from the agency and met him at the machine shed. I was not there.

Ansel drove by on his feed route around three and said they were both under the planter on creepers, and Garrick had grease to his elbows.

There was nothing much wrong with Dad’s planter. A worn drive chain and a bad meter on row six. Clem fixed it in an afternoon. But Garrick did not put it on the consignment sale.

What he did instead, two weeks later, was come to my house on a Sunday night with his reading glasses and his pile of statements. He sat at my kitchen table and spread them out.

“I ran it again,” he said. “The custom operator cost more than I figured. Replant on the creek side, the spraying he was late on, the yield hit we’re going to take. It’s close to a wash with what I was paying Clem.”

“So what are you saying?”

“I’m saying I was wrong about the math,” my brother said. “And I was wrong about the rest of it too. I just couldn’t see it from my desk.”

He did not cry. We are Roeslers, and we do not do much of that in kitchens.

But he took his glasses off and set them on the statements and sat there a minute with his hand over his eyes.

“I was scared, Marnie,” he said. “I’m still scared. Dad’s care isn’t getting any cheaper.”

“I know,” I said. “I know you are.” And I reached across and put my hand on his, the way I had held Dad’s bad hand in April.