The Six Rows Dad Planted for the Widows

I drove Dad home at four. He was quiet in the cab.

When we pulled into his yard, the cellar door was still standing open from the day before. He looked at it, and then he looked at me.

“Shut that, would you,” he said. “Cold’s getting out.”

I shut it. I hung the key on its nail inside the porch door.

That should be the end of the story, but you plant potatoes in April and you dig them in September and October, and in between is a whole summer, and the summer is part of it.

The rows came up in the middle of May. Dad came out to my place every few days to look at them.

In June we hilled them. Royce came out on a Saturday without being asked and ran the hillers with the 8N while Dad told him he was going too fast.

He had traded the new pickup by then. He drove a ten-year-old Chevy with a cracked windshield and two hundred thousand miles on it, paid for.

Sometime that summer the two hundred and forty dollars came back. Dad found it in August, folded up in the coffee can on the cellar shelf where he keeps his twine and his spare knife. Twelve twenty-dollar bills. There was no note.

Dad brought it to me in his shirt pocket and showed it to me. “Your brother,” he said.

“Could be,” I said.

“It’s your brother.” He looked at the money a while. Then he put it back in his pocket. “I’ll buy next year’s seed with it,” he said. “From Halvard. Full price.”

In the third week of September we dug. Royce took the day off and brought a neighbor’s two-row digger behind his old Chevy, and Kristel took a personal day from school, and we dug all six rows in one Saturday, a clear cool fall day with the aspens starting to turn gold up on the Ashton hill.

They came up beautiful. Big, clean Russets, hardly any scab, hardly any hollow heart. You could see the soil had been good to them.

Dad knelt in the dirt at the end of the first row, which he should not have done at eighty-four, and picked up the first big one and held it up to the light.

“Well,” he said. It was the same word he said in the cellar in April. It did not sound anything like the same word.

Near the middle of the third row I found my rock. The little rock I had set beside my seed piece the morning Dad folded my fingers over it.

It was still there, half buried. I dug under it with my hands and pulled up the plant, and there were seven potatoes on it, big and clean.

I did not say anything about it. But I put the biggest one in my jacket pocket, and it sat on the kitchen windowsill at our house until Kristel made me cook it, and I am not ashamed to tell you I did not eat it in a hurry.

We filled burlap sacks on the tailgate. Fifty pounds each. Dad tied every sack with twine from his coffee can, and wrote nothing on them, because he has never needed to write anything on them. He knows every porch on that road.

On the first Saturday of October we loaded the sacks into Royce’s Chevy and mine. Dad rode with Royce.

I followed behind with the rest. We went out the county road toward Marysville, bright cold morning, frost still on the stubble in the shade.