The Six Rows Dad Planted for the Widows

I have thought about that a lot. I think anything Dad could have said, Royce had already said to himself in that truck.

Dad knew it. He did not need to say it again. He just needed to give him something to do with his hands.

Royce did not go back to work that afternoon. I heard him call his boss from the tailgate and say he had a family thing.

He cut seed the rest of the afternoon. When the bucket was full again, Dad sent him down to me, and I handed Royce my planting bucket and let him finish the last stretch of the sixth row himself.

I watched him from the end of the row. He knelt in the furrow in his gravel company shirt and his good jeans, which were not good anymore by the end of it, and set the pieces one foot apart, eyes up.

He had not planted a potato in thirty years. He remembered how.

People looked at the tailgate and saw Virgil Strand and both his sons, and they lifted two fingers off the wheel, and Dad lifted two back.

Around two o’clock a farm pickup pulled in on the shoulder and Halvard got out. He was off at noon from the co-op.

He had a box of doughnuts from the bakery in town, and he set them on the tailgate without a word, and then he looked at Royce on his knees in the sixth row.

He did not say anything to Royce. He just stood there a minute with his hands in his back pockets and looked at him, and Royce looked up at him from the dirt, and then Royce looked back down and set the next piece.

Halvard nodded to Dad and got back in his truck and drove off. That was all.

But I saw Royce’s ears, and they were red the rest of the afternoon, and it was not from the sun.

I closed the last rows with the hillers at about three-thirty. Dad sat on the tailgate and watched the 8N go down each one, and when I got to the end of the sixth he called it out loud, as I knew he would.

“That’s six,” he called. Then he added, loud enough for the road, “Royce finished that one,” and Royce, who was sitting next to him again by then, put his face in his hands a second and then laughed a little, the first laugh I had heard out of him in a year.

Before Royce left he stood by his truck a minute with me. Dad was still on the tailgate, wrapping his knife back in the dish towel, and could not hear us.

“I’ll pay you back for the seed,” he said. “The co-op seed. And the two-forty I’ll get to Dad.”

“Pay Dad,” I said. “Not me. He won’t take it, so you’ll have to figure out how to get it to him without him knowing.”

Royce nodded. He looked at his truck. It was a nice truck. The sun was shining off it.

“I’m going to trade it,” he said. “Down to something I can pay for. I should have done it in January.”

“That’s your business,” I said, and I meant it kindly, and he took it that way. He shook my hand.

Then he walked back over to the tailgate and shook Dad’s hand too, which he had not done since Mom’s funeral, and Dad held on a little longer than you would for a handshake.