The Six Rows Dad Planted for the Widows

I filled a smaller bucket from his big one and carried it to the first furrow and knelt down in the dirt. One piece every foot, cut side down, eyes up.

Dad had started humming. It was an old hymn, the one about the sower going out to sow, the one Mom used to play on the church piano every fall on Harvest Sunday.

Dad cannot carry a tune in a bucket, but he kept at it, low, the whole time he cut, and I do not think he knew he was doing it.

Before I set the first piece, he called out to me. “Anders. Hold up.”

I stopped. He set his knife down on the cushion and took his cap off and held it against his chest.

He looked out over the six empty furrows toward the mountains, and he said, not loud, “Lord, make it grow, and send it where it’s needed.”

Then he put his cap back on and picked up the knife.

That was the whole prayer. That is how Dad prays, the same way he plants, short and in a straight line.

The sun got up over us and warmed my back through my tan canvas jacket. The first row took almost an hour.

When I got to the far end, by the gate, I stood up and turned around and Dad was watching from the tailgate three hundred feet away.

“That’s one,” he called. His voice carried down the strip in the still air.

The second row went quicker. I had my knees under me by then.

When I stood up at the far end he called, “That’s two,” and lifted his knife in the air like a man holding up a trophy.

Cars came along the county road every so often. It is not a busy road.

Folks out here know what an old man on a tailgate and a younger one on his knees in April means. It means hand planting.

It means somebody’s garden, or somebody’s trouble. Nobody honked. A couple of drivers lifted two fingers off the steering wheel, the way you do on a county road.

Dad lifted two fingers back to every one of them, knife and all.

Around nine-thirty a little white car I did not know came down the road and slowed and stopped on the shoulder across from us.

An older woman with a scarf over her hair rolled down her window and looked at us for a long time. Then she waved and drove on.

“Ingeborg,” Dad said. “She’s on the route. Fourth stop. She’ll have that on the phone to Leota before she gets to the highway.”

“Is that good or bad?”

“Depends on what she says,” Dad said, and went on cutting.

Halfway down the third row he called my name. Not loud, but the way he says it when he wants me to come, and I have been coming to that voice my whole life.

I set my bucket down in the furrow and walked back up to the tailgate.

He had a seed piece in his hand, a good one, three eyes, cut clean.

He took my hand and turned it palm up, and he set the piece in my palm, and he folded my fingers over it with his own. His hands were cold and rough and dusty with potato starch.

He used to do that when I was five. Every spring, the first seed piece, he would put it in my hand and fold my fingers over it, and say I had to plant that one, and it was mine, and I would get to dig whatever came up from it.