For twenty-two years I asked God every morning to send my son home to the farm, and the morning He finally answered, He sent my daughter, in her work boots, with the coffee already made.
It was a Thursday in July, a quarter past five, and the light was coming gray over the east pasture. I came down the back stairs in my robe with my notebook under my arm, the way I had every morning for most of my adult life. The percolator was going. My daughter Dorene sat at the table in her canvas coat with wheat chaff in her hair, both hands around a mug, and she had plainly not been to bed.
She had been in the combine until twenty minutes before midnight, when the hail came. Now she looked at me over the rim of the mug with eyes so tired they were nearly gentle.
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I sat down across from her. I opened the notebook to a fresh page. And because I am a woman who was raised to say the proper thing, I said, “Thank you for helping, honey. I don’t know what we would have done.”
Dorene set down the mug.
“Mama,” she said, “I wasn’t helping.”
I did not understand her. I sat there with my pencil in my hand and I truly did not understand what my own child was telling me, and I had been praying for twenty-two years.
I will tell you what she said next. But first I have to tell you what I had written in that notebook every morning since I was fifty-one, and who was missing from every page.
My name is Treva Udall. I am seventy-three years old, and I live on a wheat and cattle place outside Potter Hill, Colorado, on the high dry plains where the nearest stoplight is fifty miles off. My husband Stan and I farmed twelve hundred and forty acres there for forty-nine years, nine hundred and sixty of dryland wheat and milo and two hundred and eighty of native grass for sixty mother cows. Every acre came down to Stan from his father, who got it from a homestead claim his own father proved up in 1911.
We had two children: Hollis, and Dorene three years behind him.
Hollis was the kind of boy people remark on. He was quick. He could take a swather apart at nine and put it back together at ten with a part left over that turned out to be unnecessary. He had Stan’s long hands and my mother’s easy way with anybody. He went off to the university to study engineering, and by twenty-seven he was designing water systems for a city in Arizona. I was proud. I was also heartbroken, though I would not have said so, because in my mind the farm had always had his name on it.
I did not think I was being unfair. That is how Potter Hill was raised. The farm goes down through the son. The daughter marries well and brings a casserole at Christmas. Nobody ever said it. It was the weather we lived in.
The autumn I was fifty-one, Hollis came home for Thanksgiving, and after the pie he stood in the kitchen with his hands in his back pockets and said, “Mama, Dad, I’m not coming back. I’m sorry. I thought you ought to hear it from me.”
Stan nodded slowly and went out to look at the cattle, which is what Stan did with feelings.
I said, “Then the Lord will have to see to it.”