The Van Dad Drove to Church

What Dad wanted

That Tuesday night, after I had Dad settled, I sat at his kitchen table with a cup of his terrible coffee.

I told him I was going over to Garrett’s in the morning, and that I would get the money out of him one way or another.

Dad shook his head before I finished. “No,” he said. “You leave your brother be.”

“Dad, he sold your van out from under you and kept the money.”

“I know what he did.” He coughed a while into his handkerchief and waited until he could breathe again.

“I don’t want the ladies to hear there’s been trouble in this family. They’ve had enough trouble. Every one of them has buried a husband.”

“They’re going to hear anyway,” I said. “It’s a town of eleven hundred people.”

“Then they won’t hear it from us.” He turned his cup around on the table.

“I don’t care about the money, Nils. I care that Theda Moen and Inga Rustad and the rest of them get to church on Sunday. That’s all I want. I want them in church.”

I could have called Garrett that night and had it out. I could have driven to the implement dealer and made a scene at the parts counter in front of half the farmers in Barnes County. Plenty of men would have.

But Dad did not want a fight. He wanted six old women in a pew at ten o’clock.

And when your father is eighty-six and fourteen pounds lighter and asks you for one thing, you do the one thing.

“The doctor says you can’t drive for a few more weeks,” I reminded him.

“I know what the doctor said.” Then he looked at me over his glasses, and for the first time since the hospital, I saw a little of the old Clement Brandvold come back into his face. “He didn’t say a word about riding.”

Calling the ladies

On Wednesday Dad sat by the phone on the wall with the cord stretched across the kitchen, and he called all six of them himself, one after the other, in the order he picks them up.

I sat in the next room grading shop projects, a stack of birdhouses and cutting boards from my sophomores, and I listened to him.

He did not say anything about the van. He only said he was home and he would be by Sunday at the usual time.

Theda Moen was first. She is eighty-eight and lives on the street of white houses on the east side of town, three blocks from the church. She talked to him for twenty minutes, mostly about her tomatoes.

When he hung up, he sat a minute. “She heard I was done driving,” he said. “Somebody told her at the cafe. She said she’s been praying about it.”

“Who told her?”

Dad did not answer that, which was an answer. Garrett eats breakfast at the cafe every morning at six with the same four men.

Whatever he had decided about Dad, he had been saying it out loud.

Inga Rustad was last. She is ninety-one, the oldest of them, and she lives out on the edge of town in the house her husband built after the war.

Dad picks her up last because she takes the longest to come down her steps, and he does not like her to feel rushed.

“Inga,” Dad said into the phone, louder, because she does not hear well. “Sunday. Same time. Yes. Yes, I’m fine. I’ll be there.”

He hung up and looked at the empty driveway through the window over the sink. “Now I just need a van,” he said.