The Six Rows Dad Planted for the Widows

Not a big wave. Just the hand, palm out, the way you would wave a neighbor in for coffee.

Royce shut the engine off. The quiet came down over the strip.

Then Royce’s door opened, and he got out, and he stood beside his new truck a second with his hand still on the door.

He was wearing his work clothes, the orange gravel company shirt and jeans, and his boots were dusty. He looked older than fifty-two standing there. He looked like he had not slept much either.

He shut the door and came across the ditch and through the gate. He did not walk down the furrows.

He walked along the fence line the long way around, careful not to step on any of the ridged rows, and I noticed that. He still knew not to step on planted ground.

He stopped in front of the tailgate. He stood there with his hands at his sides.

“Dad,” he said.

“Royce,” Dad said.

Nobody said anything for a while. Royce looked at the bucket of cut seed, and at the sacks on the tailgate, and at the one open sack, and at Dad’s hands, which were gray with potato starch to the wrists.

“I sold your seed,” Royce said finally. His voice was rough. “I’m sorry. I was behind on the truck. I didn’t think. I didn’t think you’d…”

He stopped. He looked over at me and back at Dad. “I didn’t think.”

Dad did not answer him. He reached over and picked up the paring knife from the cushion.

He turned it around in his fingers so the blade was toward himself and the worn wooden handle was out toward Royce. Then he held it out.

Royce looked at the knife. He did not take it right away.

“Two eyes to a piece,” Dad said. “You remember. Same as your brother. I taught you both.”

Royce took the knife.

“Sit down,” Dad said, and he slid over on the boat cushion and patted the tailgate beside him. “Your brother’s got a row and a half to finish and I’m slowing down. And Royce.”

“Yeah, Dad.”

“The first sack out of these rows in October is yours to carry. You’ll take it to Leota. You’ll set it on her porch yourself and you’ll go in when she asks you in, and you’ll drink her coffee.”

Royce stood there holding the knife. His face did something I had not seen it do since we were boys, since the day his dog got hit on the county road and Dad found him in the barn.

Then he nodded once and sat down on the tailgate beside Dad.

Dad handed him a potato out of the open sack. Royce turned it over in his hand, looking for the eyes.

He found them. He cut once, twice, and the pieces dropped into the white bucket with a soft thump.

“Bigger,” Dad said. “That one’s too small. It’ll starve before it gets up.”

Royce cut the next one bigger.

“That’s it,” Dad said.

I went back to the sixth row and knelt down and picked up my bucket. My hands were not quite steady, and I set the next piece crooked and had to fix it.

Dad had not said one word to Royce about the money. He had not said one word about the cellar, or the key, or the truck, or the fellow down by St. Anthony. He had handed him a knife and told him where he would be in October. That was all.