- Late in the afternoon, I stopped at the edge of the field to load the boxes again.
- I was standing beside that green tractor in my ball cap and my canvas chore coat, with a paper seed sack in my arms. The little white farmhouse was behind me. Abby was up in the cab. And across the road, their big tractor was making its passes, with dust drifting behind it in the low sun.
- Scott was driving it.
- Randy and Luke had walked out to the edge of their field. They were standing there side by side, not talking. Watching me lift that sack.
- I didn’t look at them for long.
- I lifted the bag and poured it in. Then I lifted the next one. Then I got back in the cab.
- I planted maybe twenty acres that first day. Jeff would have done sixty, easy.
- When I finally shut the tractor off after dark, my hands were shaking. My shoulders burned so bad I couldn’t lift a gallon of milk out of the refrigerator.
- Abby made us scrambled eggs. She burned them on one side.
- Then she went to the bathroom cupboard and came back holding a little glass jar. The liniment her dad used to keep for his bad knee.
- She stood behind my kitchen chair. And she rubbed it into my shoulders with her small hands until the whole kitchen smelled like wintergreen.
- “Is this how he did it?” she asked.
- “Just like that,” I said.
- And I put my face down on the kitchen table so she wouldn’t see it.
- That night, I went back outside and filled the planter boxes again under the yard light. So I’d be ready at daylight.
- I was so tired that when I was done, I sat down on the planter hitch to rest for a second. I fell asleep sitting up, with my back against the big tractor tire.
- When I woke up, I looked across the road.
- The kitchen light was on in the home place. My old kitchen. I could see a figure standing at the window, looking out toward my yard light.
- I couldn’t tell who it was.
- Then the light went off.
- The second morning, it was barely light. I was carrying seed bags from the trailer to the planter when I heard boots on the gravel.
- I turned around.
- Luke was crossing the road. Walking, not driving. His hands were shoved in the pockets of his jacket.
- Behind him, at the edge of their field, his dad was standing beside the pickup. Watching him go.
- Randy didn’t call him back.
- I remember that. He could have. And he didn’t.
- Luke stopped at the end of my rows. He looked at my planter. At my tractor. At the stack of seed bags on the trailer.
- Then he looked at me.
- He had his dad’s face. But he had his Uncle Jeff’s way of standing, with all his weight on one leg.
- “Aunt Melissa,” he said.
- “Morning, Luke.”
- “Number six is skipping,” he said. “I could see it from over there yesterday. You’ve got a gap every few feet on that row.”
- “I fixed it,” I said. “Bent finger.”
- “Okay.” He looked at the seed bags again. Then he said, “Let me run the tractor. You haul seed. You’ll get twice as far.”
- “Your dad needs you.”
- “Uncle Scott’s running ours this morning,” he said. “Dad can run it after dinner. They’ll be fine.”
- He swallowed hard.
- “I didn’t know about the funeral thing,” he said. “The check. I didn’t know they were going to do it that day, or I’d have said something. I found out after.”
- “I believe you.”
- “And I didn’t ask for the house,” he said. “I want you to know that. Dad offered it, and I said yes. Because I didn’t think about where you’d go. I just didn’t think.”
- He looked down at his boots.
- “Uncle Jeff taught me to run a planter,” he said. “This exact same model. I was eleven.”
- “I know,” I said. “I packed your lunch.”
- He laughed. Sort of.
- Then he climbed up into the cab. Abby was already sitting in the buddy seat, waiting. She looked up at him from under the brim of that green cap. And he looked at her.
- “That’s his,” Luke said quietly.
- “I know,” Abby said.
- “It looks good on you,” he said.
- And he started the tractor.
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