The Watch I Kept for Thirty Years

The Hired Man

My father farmed a half section north of Hesper, and we had a hired man named Orville Jessup who lived in the lean-to off the machine shed. I was eight years old when Orville came, and I was fourteen when he died. In between, he taught me to back a wagon, to sharpen a hoe, and to whistle through a blade of grass.

Orville’s heart gave out in the oat field in August of 1966. My father stood over him in the stubble with his hat in his hand, and at breakfast the next morning he said to my mother, in front of me, “He was a boarder, Ruth. A boarder’s a boarder. There’s no call to make a fuss.”

My mother paid for the stone with her egg money. There was nothing in the lean-to but a coat, a razor and a Bible. In that Bible, in pencil on the flyleaf, was a list of years with a number beside each one, and the numbers were what my father had paid him. I added them up behind the machine shed that week. It came to less than a hired boy makes in three summers now. I put the Bible back where I found it and never said a word to my father.

I told myself I would never be a man who said that sentence. I told myself that for sixty years. And on a Sunday in September, the first time I was cornered at my own table by a person who was right, my father’s voice came up out of me, and it was my own.

The Promise

Wilda died in the first week of April, 2013, in a hospice room in Ludlow with a window that looked out at a parking lot and a single maple. We had been married thirty-nine years. She was lucid at the end for about a day, the way it sometimes goes, and on the Friday, the fifth, she asked me to shut the door.

She said, “Rolf, promise me about the house.”

I said I would promise her anything.

She said she wanted the house on Plum Street to stay with the children. She said she knew me. She said I was a soft touch and a lonely man, and sooner or later some woman would come along who was kind to me, and she did not want a kind woman’s name on the deed and a lawyer’s letter going to Garrett and Cady and Boyd and Kenna. She said she had watched her own sister lose the home place that way. She said, “It’s the only thing I ever asked you for.”

I promised. I held her hand and I said it in so many words: Plum Street goes to the kids. She died the following Wednesday, and I will tell you that I did not once, in all that grief, picture Elinor Crowell.

I should have told Elinor about the promise at the start. I should have told her on the second date, and I should have told her the night I asked her to marry me, on the porch of the house on Plum Street, with a ring I had bought in Ludlow with my own money. I told myself it was a private matter between me and Wilda. I told myself it would not come up. By the time it did, I had stood in front of Hesper Methodist and said “I do,” and I had a second wife I had not told, which is its own kind of lie, and it only grew.