The Six Rows Dad Planted for the Widows

He looked up when we came in and his face changed a little.

Word travels in a town of a thousand people. I do not know how Halvard knew, but he knew.

“What’ll it be, Virgil?” he said.

“Six sacks of Russet seed,” I said. “Certified. Fifty pounds each.”

Halvard wrote it up. Thirty-four dollars a sack, two hundred and four dollars.

Then he looked at the ticket and crossed it out and wrote a new number, a hundred ninety-four, and slid it across the counter, and he did not look at either of us when he did it.

“Spring discount,” he said. “Started this morning.”

Dad looked at the ticket and looked at Halvard. Halvard was busy straightening a stack of feed-store calendars that did not need straightening.

Then he came around the counter and loaded all six sacks into my truck bed himself, and wouldn’t let me lift one.

“Tell Virgil hello,” he said to me, which was a strange thing to say, since Virgil was sitting right there in the cab.

But I understood him. He meant it for the both of us.

The morning was bright and cool, and the sun was coming up clean in the east, and off to the southeast the Tetons stood up out of the valley with snow on them clear down to their shoulders.

My north strip runs along a barbed wire fence between my place and the county road.

I disked it twice last October. The soil is that light, sandy loam that Fremont County is known for, and it was dry on top and cool and damp two inches down.

Dad got out and walked to the edge of it and bent over and took up a handful.

He squeezed it and opened his hand and the dirt fell apart the way good dirt does, not sticky, not dusty. He nodded at it like he was nodding at an old friend.

“She’ll do,” he said.

Kristel had sent a boat cushion from the garage, and I set it on the tailgate, and Dad climbed up and sat on it with his legs hanging down and his bucket between his boots.

I cut open the first sack with my pocketknife and set it beside him. Then I went to fire up the 8N while he unwrapped his knife from the dish towel.

It was a short paring knife with a wooden handle, worn thin at the thumb, that he has used to cut seed for longer than I have been alive.

I opened the first furrow before the dew was off the grass along the fence. The middlebuster turns the dirt both ways and leaves a clean trench about six inches deep.

I set the rows three feet apart, the way Dad always did, so you could walk between them in July to hill them.

He cuts seed the way his father taught him. Each piece about the size of a hen’s egg, a couple of ounces, with at least two eyes on it.

He turns the potato in his hand, finds the eyes, and cuts once, twice, three times, and the pieces drop into the bucket with a soft thump.

“Fresh cut is better healed a day,” he said without looking up.

“Lets the skin come back over the cut. But the ground’s warm and it’s dry. They’ll take. Your grandpa planted fresh cut every spring of his life.”