The Prayer God Answered with My Daughter

I watched his face while I said it, and I watched something close in him like a gate.

“Mama,” he said. “I can’t. I have two years left on this project, and Beth’s mother is not well, and I have a mortgage the size of a county.” He rubbed his eyes. “Let me help you sell it. Let me find you a good buyer, and a nice little place in town with no stairs.”

No stairs. He meant it kindly. I laughed, and then I wasn’t laughing, and Dorene said, “Mama, let’s get some air,” and walked me out to the parking lot where the wind was.

That spring our neighbor Ferrell came by with his hat in his hand and offered to lease the ground. He had been Stan’s friend for fifty years, and he offered a fair number. I said, “Let me think and pray about it.” He needed an answer by the end of the following harvest. After that, the Udall place would be somebody else’s wheat.

I told the Lord so, in the notebook. Lord, Hollis, home, before the lease is signed. I underlined it. I was not praying anymore, if I am honest. I was bargaining.

And while I did all of that, Dorene farmed the ground.

I did not know it. That first spring she drove out from town every evening after her shift, and she disked and drilled and sprayed, and I thought Ferrell’s hired man was doing the work. She hauled hay to the cows in the dark. She sat with me on Sundays and listened to me worry about Hollis. She was also running a farm on her vacation days and her weekends, and she had not asked me for a nickel.

In the spring of this year, Pastor Sherwin stopped in after a hospital visit and sat with me on the porch. I told him my prayer, again. I think by then I told it to everybody. When I ran out of words, he said, “Treva, how will you know what the answer looks like?”

I said, “I’ll know it when Hollis pulls into the drive.”

He nodded. He did not argue. He only said, “I hope you’re watching the whole road.”

Now I come to the week of the hail.

Wheat harvest on the plains runs on a clock nobody controls. That July the Byrd wheat on the east section turned all at once, two weeks early, and the radio started warning about a front coming down from Wyoming. Dorene took a week of vacation and put her father’s old combine in the field. Neighbors showed up with grain carts and sandwiches, and when the front showed on the radio, Ferrell and two other men brought their own combines over from their finished fields and ran them alongside hers, because no single old machine could have cleared that ground ahead of the weather. On the third night, with six hundred and forty acres still standing and a line of green-black clouds stacked along the west, I called Hollis in Phoenix.

I said, “Hollis, we’re in a race with a storm and I need you here tonight.”

“There’s no flight tonight, Mama.” He sounded miserable. “I’ll rent a car in Denver and be there by morning.”

I wanted to scream at him, and I did not. I said, “Come home for good, Hollis. That’s all I have ever asked.”

The line went so quiet I thought the call had dropped. Then he said, in a voice that sounded like it was coming from the bottom of a well, “Mama, I’ll come in the morning. Please don’t ask me tonight.”