- Luke was 24. He’d just finished his degree in agronomy at the University of Nebraska in Lincoln. I’d been so proud of him.
- He was one of the pallbearers at Jeff’s funeral. He stood at the front left corner of the casket. He cried so hard coming down the aisle that the man behind him had to reach out and put a hand on his shoulder.
- So that was why the clean break.
- The bank wanted the balance sheet cleaned up. And Randy wanted his son to have a house to come home to.
- And somewhere in there, the two of them had talked each other into believing that handing a widow a big check at a funeral was a kindness. Because it meant I wouldn’t have to worry.
- I didn’t hate Randy for it. I want to say that plainly.
- He was a man who wanted something good for his son. And he found a way to get it that let him feel generous about it. Most of us have done some smaller version of that.
- But I wasn’t moving to town.
- I told Abby the night we closed. I sat on the edge of her bed and put the key ring in her hand.
- “We bought the Wiebe place,” I said. “The house across the road. And the eighty acres that go with it.”
- She sat straight up in bed. “We did?”
- “We did. We’re going to farm it. You and me.”
- “Do you know how?”
- I laughed. It was the first time I’d laughed in five weeks.
- “I drove grain cart for your dad for nineteen harvests,” I said. “I grew up on a farm outside Blue Hill. Your grandpa had me driving a tractor when I was younger than you are. I know how.”
- “But why there?” she asked. “Why not in town, like everybody thinks?”
- “Because your dad’s fields are right across that road,” I said. “I want you to be able to wake up every morning and see them. I want you to be able to count the passes.”
- She didn’t say anything.
- She just leaned forward and put her forehead against my shoulder. And she stayed there for a long, long time.
- We moved across the road the last week of April.
- My sister, Pam, came with her husband and their stock trailer. Two men from church came with a flatbed. And we carried twenty years of a marriage across a gravel road in a single afternoon.
- Randy’s wife, Lori, came over while we were carrying the last boxes out of the kitchen.
- She stood on the back step in her barn coat. She didn’t come in.
- Lori and I had been sisters-in-law for twenty-one years. We canned tomatoes together every single August. We’d stood side by side at that kitchen counter more times than I could count.
- “Randy says you bought the Wiebe place,” she said.
- “I did.”
- “He didn’t know,” Lori said. “He found out from Dale Kroeker at the elevator.”
- She looked past me at the empty kitchen. At the bare nail where my calendar used to hang.
- “Melissa, I told him the funeral was the wrong day,” she said. “I want you to know that. I told him.”
- “I know you did,” I said.
- I didn’t know. But I believed her.
- Lori turned to go. Then she stopped and turned back.
- “Jeff’s seed cap is still on the hook,” she said. She pointed. “By the door. You don’t want to leave that.”
- I’d missed it.
- It was his green cap with the yellow deer on the front. The one he wore every single spring. It had hung on that same nail by the back door every night of our marriage.
- Abby took it off the hook before I could reach it.
- She put it on her head. It came down over her ears and sat right on top of her eyebrows. She pushed the brim back with one finger and looked up at me. Daring me to say something.
- I didn’t say anything. I couldn’t have.
- The first week of May came in warm and dry. The ground was fit.
- On Wednesday morning, I heard Randy’s big tractor fire up in the yard across the road. By seven o’clock, they were pulling the partnership’s twenty-four-row planter out onto Jeff’s ground. The half section that runs along the road on the east side.
- I’d been up since four.
- I had the 6420 greased and fueled. The planter boxes loaded. The seed plates set. I’d checked the markers twice.
- At seven o’clock sharp, I pulled out of the Wiebe yard and turned onto my own field, on the west side of the same gravel road.
- I’d like to tell you somebody waved.
- Nobody waved.
- I could see Randy standing beside his pickup at the edge of their field with a coffee cup in his hand. I saw him see me.
- Then he turned around and looked the other way.
- It wasn’t easy. I want to be honest about that too.
- I’d planted a lot of fields with Jeff. Riding along with him. Running the end rows when he wanted to eat a sandwich. But I’d never planted a whole farm by myself.
- The tractor pulled to the left. The number six row unit kept dropping doubles until I finally stopped and climbed down and found a bent finger on the seed plate.
- I lost forty minutes every time I filled the boxes. I didn’t own a seed tender. Every refill meant hauling fifty-pound bags off the trailer and lifting them up over my head into the hopper. One at a time.
- Abby rode with me all day.
- She sat in the buddy seat in her dad’s green cap with a thermos of lemonade between her feet and a library book in her lap she never opened.
- Every time we turned around at the end of a pass, she put one hand up on top of her head to keep the cap from sliding off.
- “Dad let me ride when I was little,” she said, somewhere in the middle of the afternoon. “I always had to hold the cap on at the turns. He said if it fell off, the corn wouldn’t come up.”
- “That’s not true,” I said.
- “I know,” she said. “I hold it on anyway.”
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