The Six Rows Dad Planted for the Widows

He started doing it the fall after Mom died. That was nineteen years ago.

I asked him once why, and he said, “Your mother always sent a sack to the Ambrose place. I just kept going down the road.”

The Ambrose place was the first stop. Leota Ambrose is eighty-one now, a tiny woman who still keeps chickens and still mows her own yard on a riding mower older than my truck.

For nineteen falls Leota got the first sack. She would have the coffee on when Dad pulled in, because she knew the day, and she would send him home with a loaf of bread or a jar of chokecherry jelly. That sack was the start of the whole route.

Dad sat on that cellar step and I knew he was thinking about Leota’s porch in October, with nothing to set on it.

“I’ve got the strip along my north fence,” I said. “I disked it last fall. I was going to put oats on it and never got to it.”

Dad turned his head and looked at me.

“It’s three hundred feet long. That’s six good rows, Dad. The co-op opens at seven. I’ll take a day of leave tomorrow and let my sub run the route. We’ll buy seed and plant it on my place, and you won’t have to work your garden ground at all this year.”

“Certified seed’s not cheap,” he said.

“I know what it costs. I’ll stop at the bank.”

He looked back at the potato in his hands. Then he put it back in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap again, and he stood up, holding the door frame of the cellar, and he looked down the hill toward the road.

“I’ll need my good knife,” he said. “And the white bucket. And you’ll want to bring a cushion for that tailgate, because I’m not as padded as I was.”

That was the closest thing to a yes I was ever going to get from Virgil Strand, and I took it.

I drove home that evening while it was still light and told Kristel.

My wife is the secretary at the elementary school in Ashton, and she did not say anything for a while after I told her.

I called my sub that night. Rural carriers work six days, but we each get one day a week off, and the relief carrier covers our route.

I asked the young man who has covered my route for four years if he could take Friday too. He said sure, and did not ask why.

Then I went out and checked the tractor. I have an old Ford 8N that was Grandpa’s, rebuilt twice.

I bolted the middlebuster on the back, because you open a seed furrow with a middlebuster, and I checked the tires and the oil and filled the gas.

At a quarter to seven the next morning I was in Dad’s yard.

He was already standing at the end of his walk with his knife wrapped in a dish towel and the white five-gallon bucket hanging from one hand, and his green feed cap pulled down tight.

“You’re late,” he said. It was a quarter to seven. He climbed up into the truck by himself and set the bucket between his boots.

The co-op in Ashton sits by the tracks, a long tin building with a loading dock and the feed bins out back.

The man at the counter was Halvard. He is close to Dad’s age, retired from a seed farm himself, and he works mornings at the co-op because he says his wife wants him out of the house.