Part 2: Hat in His Hand
By the middle of June, that field was telling the whole story to anybody who drove past. And in our country, everybody drives past.
Corn planted right comes up like a church choir. Everybody the same height. Standing in straight rows.
This came up like a school picture. Knee-high in one spot, four inches tall the next. Skips in the row as long as a man lying down. Then three plants crowded together in a clump. Yellow streaks where the roots couldn’t break out of a seed trench that had baked hard as a clay pot.
Nobody had put down a weed killer ahead of it, either. The waterhemp was coming up in a green haze between the rows.
And the pivot hadn’t turned once. It sat at the exact angle it had been parked at last September. With a flat tire on the fifth tower.
On the east eighty, they had planted dryland corn at an irrigated population. Thirty-two thousand seeds to the acre, on ground that will only carry twenty-four thousand in a good year.
If July came in hot, every stalk out there was going to be fighting its neighbor for a drink of water.
* * *
I wasn’t there for what happened next.
Butch told me his side of it later. And Phil told me his. The two of them matched, which is how I know it’s true.
It was a Thursday evening, the eleventh of June.
Phil had driven out from Omaha after work. He had been doing that every week. Sleeping in his old bedroom. Walking fields he didn’t know how to read.
He was standing at the end rows of the pivot quarter in a pair of work boots that still had the yellow in the laces.
Butch pulled his pickup over on the shoulder, got out, and leaned on the line fence. He didn’t say hello. He just looked at that corn for most of a minute.
“Your dad,” he said finally, “would’ve said a blind mule plants straighter.”
Phil didn’t answer.
“He’d have said you could lose a hog in those skips. He’d have said whoever set that planter ought to be made to eat the seed tags.”
“I expect he would,” Phil said.
“What’d that outfit charge you?”
“Twenty-eight dollars an acre. Plus seed.”
“Hm.”
Butch let that sit there.
“You know what else Albert would’ve said?”
“What.”
“He’d have said it’s the eleventh of June, and it isn’t lost yet. Corn’s forgiving if you get to it. That needs sprayed by Monday. It needs nitrogen put on beside the row. And that pivot needs to be walking before the Fourth of July, or you can forget the whole business.”
Phil looked over at the pivot.
“I don’t know how to start it.”
“I know you don’t.”
“I had a man out to look at it. He said the panel was throwing a fault, and he could come back in two weeks.”
“You don’t have two weeks.”
Butch told me Phil took his cap off then and ran his hand back over his head. The exact way our father did when he was whipped. Butch said it gave him a turn to see it.
“There’s a man eleven miles from here,” Butch said, “who knows which tower sticks on that machine. And what to hit it with.”
“I know there is.”
“Then what in the world are you standing here talking to me for?”
Phil put his cap back on.
“Because I got the farm and he got a truck, Butch. How am I supposed to drive into his yard and ask him for anything?”
Butch said he thought about that a minute. He said it was the first time in thirty years he thought Phil sounded like one of us.
“The same way he’d have to drive into yours,” Butch said. “Slow. With your hat in your hand.”
Then Butch said one more thing. I’ll come back to it.
“I asked your dad twice for that east eighty. It lays right up against my ground. I’d have paid him fair both times. He said his father bought it in 1961 with hog money, and he wasn’t going to be the one to sell it.”
Butch straightened up off the fence wire.
“I’m just telling you. That offer never went anywhere.”
* * *
I was greasing the feed truck that evening.
It was past eight o’clock and still light out. That long June light that makes everything look better than it is. I had the grease gun on the driveline when I heard tires on gravel.
It was Dad’s pickup. The blue three-quarter-ton with the cracked taillight.
For half a second, coming up my lane with the sun behind it, it was him.
Phil got out slowly. His new boots were muddy to the ankles.
He walked across the yard and stopped beside the running board of the feed truck. He looked up at the cab. At the windshield. I knew he could see the gloves.
Then my brother took off his cap.
I had never in my life seen him take his cap off to ask for anything. Not for a loan. Not for a girl. Not at our mother’s bedside.
“Wade,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”
I wiped my hands on a rag.
“Go ahead.”
“I don’t know what I’m looking at out there.” His voice was steady. But it cost him. I could hear it cost him. “I know it’s bad. I don’t know how bad. And I don’t know what to do first. Would you come look at it?”
Four months I had waited for that sentence.
Some nights, I had planned exactly what I’d say back. Most of it wasn’t very Christian.
But standing there, what I saw was a man in his fifties holding his cap in both hands in front of his little brother.
And I didn’t have a single one of those speeches left in me.
“Saturday,” I said. “I work till noon.”
He let his breath out.
“I’ll pay you. Whatever you say.”
“You’ll pay the co-op for the spray and the nitrogen. That’ll be enough of a bill.”
I hung the grease gun back on its nail.
“And Phil. I’ll look at it. I’m not saying anything more than that yet.”
“That’s fair.”
“Why Kansas?”
He turned the cap around once in his hands.
“Because they didn’t know me,” he said. “I couldn’t ask you. And everybody else around here would’ve known I hadn’t asked you.”
It was an honest answer.
It was also the exact same answer I had given Theresa back in April. Just with the words turned around.
“Saturday,” I said again.
He nodded. He looked one more time at the windshield, at the gloves.
Then he drove our father’s pickup back down the lane.
* * *
Saturday, I got off at noon and was home by a quarter past. I ate standing up at the counter.
What I needed before I went over there was the green notebook. The pivot panel was throwing a fault. And Dad had written down every fault that machine ever threw, and what he had done about it.
It wasn’t in the shop. I had looked when I cleaned out my tools in March.
That left the truck.
Dad always kept his things on the passenger side. Under the bench seat on that side was where the log chain lived. And the jumper cables. And anything else he didn’t want his boys borrowing.
In four months of driving that truck twice a day, I had never once reached under that side of the seat.
It was still his side. I hadn’t even touched the seed corn cap sitting there.
I got down on the running board and reached under.
Log chain. Jumper cables. A coffee can of cotter pins.
And back against the cab wall, a zippered bank bag from the State Bank. The kind they give you for deposits.
The green notebook was in it.
So was an envelope.
It was a plain white envelope with a flag stamp in the corner. Addressed in my father’s block printing, the printing of a man who learned to write on a slate.
To me. My name. Our road. Elba, Nebraska.
It was sealed. He had gotten as far as the stamp.
I sat down on the running board in the sun and opened it with my pocketknife.
One sheet torn off a yellow legal tablet. Dated the ninth of November. Four days before he went in to see Don Jensen.
I’m going to set it down here exactly the way he wrote it.
Wade. I am no hand at this so I will say it plain.
The place is not clear. I borrowed on it in 2012 for the pivot. And again when your mother was sick. And again after the water in 2019. It is three hundred eighty-eight thousand dollars. The payment is thirty-eight thousand a year, and this place has not made thirty-eight thousand clear in six years. I have been paying the bank with the bank’s money. I never told you boys. I was ashamed.
If I leave it to you, you will keep it. I know you. You will pay that bank until you are as old as I am, and Theresa will do without, same as your mother did, and you will never say a word. I will not do that to you.
Phil will sell it. He can count, and he does not love it. Do not hold that against him. I made him that way. I told him the summer he was nineteen that he was no farmer, and he believed me. He will clear the bank and there will be a good deal left, and he will split it with you fair. I would bet the place on it. I guess I have.
You get the truck because it is paid for, and it is the only thing out here that is.
I ought to mail this. I will probably put it in the truck.
You were the best help a man ever had. I should have said so when it would have done you some good.
Dad.
I read it twice.
Then I couldn’t see it well enough to read it a third time.
Twenty-two years. He had never once said it.
Not at the sale barn when my calves topped the market. Not the night we pulled twins in a blizzard at two in the morning. Not once.
He had written it on a yellow tablet. Bought a stamp. And then lost his nerve and tucked it under the seat of a truck, with his log chain. Where he knew I’d get to it sooner or later.
It took me four months. Because I wouldn’t reach across to his side.
Theresa came out to see why I hadn’t left yet. She found me on the running board with the paper in my hand and my face in a state.
I handed it up to her.
She read it standing there. When she finished, she sat down beside me on that narrow step. Hip to hip.
“He knew you,” she said quietly. “He knew just exactly what you’d do.”
“He could’ve told me.”
“No. He couldn’t. That’s the saddest thing in it.”
She folded the sheet back along his creases.
“He could put a pivot on a quarter and pull a calf in the dark. And he could not say one kind sentence to your face. So he wrote it down. That’s something, Wade. For him, that’s just about everything.”
I put my head down on her shoulder. A fifty-one-year-old man. In my own yard. In the middle of a Saturday.
When I could, I climbed up into the cab.
I set the notebook on the seat. I set the envelope on the dash, right beside the gloves.
And I drove the feed truck eleven miles to the home place at forty-five miles an hour. The same way I had driven it away.
