The Farm Sign at the End of Our Lane

At a quarter past nine on a Monday morning in October, I came home from the pharmacy in Brannock with my husband’s new heart pills on the seat beside me, and the farm sign at the end of our lane had my son’s name on it and nobody else’s.

I did not understand it at first. I slowed the truck the way I always do at that corner, because the gravel is loose where the county road meets our lane. My eyes went to the sign, the way they have gone to it ten thousand times, the way your tongue goes to a tooth. And the sign was wrong. The two cedar posts were right, the ones Stan set himself in the spring of 1976 with a post-hole digger and a borrowed level and a good deal of language I will not repeat. But the board between them was a clean white panel, brighter than anything out here has any business being, and the lettering across it was as straight as a ruler.

It said Jared Petrak Farms.

Underneath, in smaller letters, it said Owner and Operator.

That was all it said. There was no Stan. There was no Lavonne. There was no wheat sheaf, no Since 1976, none of the things I had put on that board with my own hand when I was twenty-one years old and thought I knew what a life was going to cost.

I stopped the truck in the middle of the road and put it in park. A grain truck came over the rise from the east, and the driver, a boy I have known since he was in a car seat, lifted two fingers off the wheel and went around me without a word, because that is how we do it out here. You do not honk at a woman who has stopped in the road. You assume she has a reason.

I had a reason. I sat there with my hands in my lap and the pill bag crackling on the seat, and I read that sign four times, the way you read a telegram.

My name is Lavonne Petrak. I am seventy-one years old. My husband Stan is seventy-four, and for two years now his heart has been wearing out and his mind has been going with it, slowly, a little more each season, like a field returning to prairie. Our son Jared is forty-seven. He farms the ground with his father, or he did until his father could not, and for the last year he has farmed it mostly alone. I want you to know all of that before I tell you what I did next, because it would be easy to hear the first part of this story and decide you know who the villain is.

I thought I did, for about the first hour.

I put the truck back in gear and drove up the lane, the dust trailing behind me like smoke, and went straight to the shop behind Jared’s house. His pickup was parked crooked, the way he parks when he is in a hurry. I could hear a ratchet going.

He was lying on a creeper under the planter with only his boots showing. I stood in the door and let my eyes adjust to the dim.

“Jared.”

The ratchet stopped. “Hey, Mom. Give me a minute, I’ve got a chain off here.”

“Whose sign is that at the end of the lane?”