The Pantry Rows on Our Farm

Erv was in the machine shed with the planter, greasing fittings. It was still light out, that thin March light that makes everything look colder than it is. He took one look at my face and put the grease gun down.

I told him. He listened the way he always listens, with his arms crossed and his eyes on the floor, like he is reading the story off the concrete.

“Twenty-eight thousand,” he said when I was done.

“For a shop building.”

“Ulysses’s a decent guy.” Erv rubbed his jaw. “He probably thinks he did her a favor. Rod probably told him she wanted it gone.”

“She didn’t want it gone. She wanted us not to fight.”

He nodded. Then he looked out the open shed door, across the yard, toward the two acres along the east side of the shed. That ground was going into soybeans in May, same as the field behind it.

He was quiet a long time. Long enough that I thought he was thinking about something else entirely.

“That’s good ground,” he said finally. “Lays flat. Drains good. Close to the hydrant.”

“Erv.”

“Two acres is a lot more than half an acre. She’d have to have help.”

“She’d have to have a lot of help.”

“Well.” He picked up the grease gun again. “I’ll hook up the disk Saturday if it dries out.”

I knew what that cost us. Two acres out of beans is maybe a hundred and ten bushels, and beans were near ten dollars.

That was a thousand dollars, a little more, that we were not going to see in the fall. We are not a big operation.

Neither of us said it out loud. That is how Erv and I have done the hard things for twenty-six years. One of us says the sentence, and the other one picks up the tool.

The next morning was Saturday. I drove into town and knocked on Mom’s back door at seven.

She was already up, dressed, sitting at the table with her coffee and the seed tin in front of her. She had not put it back on the porch.

“Erv wants to know how you want the two acres laid out,” I said.

She looked at me over her cup. “What two acres.”

“Ours. By the machine shed. He’s disking it today if it’s dry enough.”

She set the cup down very carefully. For a minute she did not say anything at all. Then she pressed her lips together and looked at the ceiling, which is what my mother does instead of crying.

“Your soybeans,” she said.

“Erv says it’s good ground. Lays flat. Drains good.”

“It does lay flat.” She wiped her eye with her good hand. “I’ll need my lawn chair. I’m not getting down on the ground out there, Marnie. I learned that lesson.”

“You’re not getting down on anything,” I said. “You’re going to sit in a chair and boss us.”

“Well,” she said, and for the first time since Rod’s truck pulled away, she almost smiled. “I can do that.”

We planted the first potatoes in the middle of April. Iowa in April is a gamble, but potatoes do not mind the cold.

Erv had the ground disked and dragged by then, dark and crumbly, and it smelled like spring does when it finally means it.