The Six Rows Dad Planted for the Widows

“You put that one in,” he said. “That’s yours. Same as always.”

I could not say anything. I stood there with that cold seed piece in my fist.

I turned my head and looked at the mountains a minute, at the snow on the Grand, until I could trust my face again.

Then I walked back to my spot in the third row and knelt down and set it in the dirt with the eyes up, and I put a little rock beside it, the way I did when I was five, so I would know which one was mine.

When I looked back at the tailgate, Dad was cutting again, and humming, and he was not looking at me.

I believe he was giving me a minute, the same way I had been giving him one all morning.

By ten we had three rows planted and I went back and closed them.

I put the disc hillers on the toolbar of the 8N and drove down each row slow, and the hillers rolled the dirt back over the seed in a neat little ridge.

We ate Kristel’s ham sandwiches on the tailgate at ten-thirty. Dad looked at the three finished rows a long time while he ate.

“Your mother would have liked this,” he said. “She liked to see a field just planted. She said it was the most hopeful thing on God’s earth. Nothing up yet. Everything still coming.”

I did not say anything. He was not talking to me exactly.

After lunch I went back to planting the fourth row. The sun was full up now and warm, and I took my jacket off and laid it on the fence post.

Dad kept cutting. The fourth row went fast, and the fifth went faster, and he called each one.

“That’s four,” he called. And later: “That’s five.”

By noon I was halfway down the sixth row. I was kneeling there with the bucket, setting pieces one foot, two foot, three foot, when I heard a pickup coming down the road from the Ashton end.

I knew it before I looked up. You know the sound of your brother’s truck the same as you know his voice on the phone.

Royce.

He came down the county road at about fifteen miles an hour, which nobody does on that road.

Then he pulled onto the gravel shoulder by my mailbox, maybe sixty feet from the tailgate, and stopped, and sat there with the engine running.

I could see him through the windshield. He had both hands on the wheel. He was not looking at me. He was looking at the rows.

Six of them. Five planted, the sixth half done, three hundred feet long each, running straight toward the mountains.

His father on the tailgate on a boat cushion, with his cap and his paring knife and his bucket. His brother on his knees in the dirt.

I do not know how long he sat there. Maybe a minute. It felt longer. The engine idled. The meadowlark sang on the fence post like nothing at all was happening.

I stood up slowly and brushed the dirt off my knees. I did not walk toward him. I did not say anything.

I had decided the night before, lying awake, that whatever happened when Royce saw this, it was going to be Dad’s to say, not mine.

Dad set his knife down on the cushion beside him. He wiped his hands slowly on his pant legs, first one and then the other, the way he does before he shakes a man’s hand. Then he lifted one hand and waved Royce over.