The Six Rows Dad Planted for the Widows

“Did you sell Dad’s seed?” I asked him. I kept my voice low.

Dad was sitting fifteen feet away on the cellar step with his hands on his knees, looking out across the yard at the garden ground he had already worked once with his little tiller.

Royce did not deny it. I will give him that. He was quiet a second and then he said, “A fellow down by St. Anthony grows for the farmers market. He gave me two-forty for the lot. He came out with his trailer this morning.”

“Two hundred forty dollars,” I said. “For six hundred pounds of Dad’s seed.”

“I was two months behind on the truck, Anders. They called me twice last week. They were going to come get it. I figured Dad’s eighty-four years old. He’s got no business out there on his knees planting an acre anyway. He’d never miss a cellar of potatoes.”

I looked over at Dad sitting on that step. He had taken the potato out of his shirt pocket again and was holding it in both hands in his lap, the way you might hold a bird that flew into a window.

“He misses them,” I said. “He’s sitting right here missing them.”

“I’ll make it right when I can,” Royce said, and then he said he was on the job and had to go, and he hung up.

I stood there with the phone in my hand, and I did not call him back.

I will tell you plainly why I did not drive to Royce’s place that night and have it out with him on his front porch, because I have thought about it many times since.

But Dad would not hear a word against Royce. He never has.

And a fight between his two sons, at eighty-four, would have cost Dad more than six hundred pounds of seed. It would have cost him a son.

I walked over and sat down next to Dad on the cellar step. The rock was cool through my jeans.

“I talked to Royce,” I said.

“I figured,” Dad said. He did not ask what Royce said. He turned the potato over in his hands. “Fellow down by St. Anthony?”

“How did you know?”

“There’s only one fellow down there who’d buy seed out of a man’s cellar without asking the man.”

He was quiet a while. “It’ll be cut and planted by now. He doesn’t waste a day.”

That was the end of any notion I had about buying it back. A potato that has been cut and dropped in a furrow is not coming back out to go to anybody’s widows.

I need to tell you about the widows, because that is what the seed was for, and that is why Dad sat on the step the way he did.

He sold the ground to a neighbor when he turned seventy and kept the house, the yard, the cellar and an acre of garden ground.

But he could not quit growing potatoes. It was not in him.

So every spring he planted that acre, by hand, all of it, and every October he dug it, and he filled burlap sacks, fifty pounds each, and he drove them up and down the county road toward Marysville in his old truck.

Twelve widows. Women he had known since he was a boy, or women whose husbands he had farmed beside, or just women along the road who were alone now and on a fixed check.

He would set a sack on each porch and knock and visit a minute and drive on.