The Six Rows Dad Planted for the Widows

The cellar door was standing open when we pulled into Dad’s yard, and I knew before the truck stopped rolling that something was wrong, because Dad never left that door open for a single minute in April.

It was a Thursday afternoon, a little after two. I had driven him to his heart doctor in Rexburg that morning, because Thursday is my regular day off on the mail route and Dad does not like the highway anymore.

“Ground ought to be ready by the middle of next week,” he had said, looking out at the fields along the highway.

“I’ll start cutting seed Monday. You can come Saturday and help me drop it, if your route lets you.”

Now he sat in the passenger seat and looked at that open cellar door, and he did not say anything at all.

Then he opened his door and climbed down slow, the way he does now, one hand on the frame.

I got to the cellar first. The steps go down eight feet into the hillside behind the house, rock walls Grandpa laid up in the thirties, a plank door with a hasp.

The hasp had been opened with a key, not broken. Somebody knew where Dad hung it.

The smell hit me before my eyes adjusted. Cool dirt and old wood and the sweet smell of potatoes that have wintered well.

But when I could see, the slatted bins along the back wall were bare boards, every one of them.

Six hundred pounds of seed potatoes. Dad had sorted every one by hand through the winter, sitting on an upturned bucket down there with a lantern, picking out the egg-sized ones with good eyes and no soft spots, laying them in the bins in rows.

He came down the steps behind me, one at a time, holding the rope rail. He stood next to me and looked at the empty bins for a long time.

A few loose potatoes lay in the dirt where someone had dragged sacks across the floor.

He bent down, very slowly, and picked one of them up. He turned it over in his hand and rubbed the dirt off it with his thumb.

Then he put it in the pocket of his gray work shirt and buttoned the flap.

“Well,” he said. That was all he said. Then he turned around and went back up the steps, and I heard him sit down on the top one, and I heard him breathe out like a man who has been carrying something heavy a long way.

I knew who it was before I made the call. There were tire tracks in the soft yard by the cellar, two sets, a pickup and a trailer.

And there was only one other person in the world who knew where Dad kept the cellar key, besides me.

My brother Royce is three years older than I am. He lives on the edge of Ashton in a house he bought after his divorce.

He drives truck for a gravel outfit in the summer and plows snow for the county in the winter, and he has never in his life been good with money.

Last fall he bought a new pickup. Not new to him, new off the lot in Idaho Falls, crew cab, the kind with the heated seats.

I called him standing in Dad’s yard. He picked up on the fourth ring, and there was road noise behind him, and he already sounded tired, like he had known this call was coming all day.