Hollis came home again the next June, for harvest. He sat in the passenger seat of the combine beside his sister with a thermos between his boots. She drove. He rode. He is a water engineer, and in the evenings he walked the south pasture and drew up a plan for a pipeline to run fresh water to the stock tanks, so the cows would not have to walk to the creek in a dry year. He and Dorene put it in that April, with Ferrell’s boy and a rented trencher. The cows stand at the tanks now in the morning light with their breath smoking.
He and Dorene put it in that April, with Ferrell’s boy and a rented trencher. The water comes up from the old well and fills the tanks now, and the cows stand at them in the morning light with their breath smoking.
That is how my son came home to the farm.
Not to take it over. Not to stay. But he comes, every harvest and every spring when the calves are born, and I see his father in the way he leans at the fence beside his sister. We pray together on the phone now, a short one, before we hang up. He says amen with me.
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People ask whether it troubles me that God did not answer my prayer the way I asked it. I think I prayed for a thing, and God gave me what the thing was for.
I wanted the farm to stay in the family. It stayed. I wanted a child of mine to love the ground the way Stan loved it. One does, more than any of us ever did. I wanted to grow old in my own house with the wheat coming up green outside the window, and I am doing that this very week. All that was different was the name.
And here is what that taught me about thanking God, which I had been doing sloppily for seventy years. If you do not look closely at how a prayer was answered, you will thank Him for the wrong thing. You will say thank You for the luck, thank You for the timing, thank You for the help that came from nowhere. I had even said thank you for helping to my own daughter’s face. But I had not said thank You for the one He sent.
So I say it accurately now. I say it in the notebook every morning at a quarter past five, in pencil, in the kitchen where I have always said it. Dorene. Thank You. Some mornings I add Hollis, and Stan, and the neighbors who hauled grain in the dark. But the first line is always hers.
And some mornings, when I hear a boot on the back step and smell coffee I did not make, I look at her standing in the door of my kitchen with the light coming up behind her, and I say what I should have said years ago.
“Good morning, farmer.”
She grins. She says, “Good morning, Mama.”
If you are praying for something tonight, and it has been a long while, I want to tell you one thing from an old woman who spent twenty-two years looking the wrong direction. Keep praying. But once in a while, put down your pencil and look at the whole road. Look at who is already standing in your kitchen. The answer you want may not be the one that comes. The one that comes may be better, and it may have been sitting beside you all along, drying a dish that was already dry.
This story is a dramatization. Names, characters, and details are invented, and any resemblance to real people or events is coincidental.