The Daylilies We Put Back on County C

The Middle of the Morning

By ten o’clock we had about a quarter mile planted. The sun was high and warm, and Frieda had finally unbuttoned her cardigan, though she kept it on.

Somebody’s wife brought out a cooler of lemonade and set it on a tailgate. Somebody else brought a pan of bars, and then another pan showed up, and then a box of doughnuts from town.

The retired bus driver never did use the post hole digger. But she leaned on it like a walking stick the whole morning and told everyone it was the best tool on the job.

I took a break and sat in the grass beside Frieda’s chair. I gave her a cup of lemonade, and she held it with both hands.

“Heidi,” she said. “How long did you know about this?”

“About five days.”

“And you didn’t tell me.”

“You’d have said no.”

She thought about that. “I would have,” she admitted. “I would have said nobody had time.”

She looked down the ditch at all the people kneeling there. Somebody was singing an old hymn under their breath, “In the Garden,” a little off key. A couple of other people picked it up.

“I guess I was wrong about that,” Frieda said.

The Tractor

It was a little after eleven when we heard it.

Out here you learn to know tractors by their sound the way you know people by their walk. This was a big one, coming down County C from the north, and it was pulling something that rattled.

Everybody in the ditch heard it at the same time. Thirty heads came up.

It was Mitch. He was in his big tractor, pulling his sprayer, with the boom folded up tight against the tank for the road. He was headed for the bean field past the curve.

I saw him see the trucks first. Fifteen pickups parked on the shoulder of his road, end to end, on a Saturday in June.

Then I saw him see the people. Thirty of us, on our knees in the ditch he had sprayed, with spades and buckets and a quarter mile of fresh green lilies behind us.

Then I saw him see his aunt.

Frieda was sitting in her lawn chair at the edge of the ditch, in her red cardigan, with a cup of lemonade in her hand. She was pointing down the row, telling Gus where the next stick went.

The tractor slowed.

It slowed down to a crawl, and then it stopped, right across from her chair.

Nobody in the ditch stood up. Nobody said a word. Nobody waved, and nobody glared. We just knelt there in the dirt and looked at him.

I had wondered for a week what I would feel when this moment came. I had thought maybe I would feel proud, or angry, or like I had won something.

I did not feel any of that. I just felt tired, and sorry, and very aware of how quiet the morning had gotten.

Mitch sat in the cab for what felt like a full minute. I could see his face through the glass. He was not angry. He looked like a man who had been hit in the chest.

Then he reached down and shut the tractor off.

In the quiet afterward you could hear a meadowlark out in his hay field. You could hear the creek down at the bridge.

Mitch opened the cab door and climbed down the steps, slowly, like his knees hurt. He stood in the road for a moment.

Then he took off his seed cap, and he started walking across the road toward Frieda.