Then I drove to the co-op and asked Jeff, the manager, if he could use a man through the spring.
Jeff has known me since Little League. He looked at me across the counter and didn’t ask one single question. I’ll remember him for that.
“You still got your commercial license?”
“From when I hauled cattle for the Larsens.”
“Twenty-three an hour. I need a tender driver for the dry spreaders, and somebody who can run the feed mill when Kim’s out. You start Monday.”
So that’s how a man who’d farmed four hundred acres beside his father for twenty-two years ended up hauling other men’s fertilizer to other men’s fields.
I fed my own forty cows morning and night out of the feed truck, in the lot behind our barn. Ground hay and a little distillers grain. It was way more truck than forty cows needed.
Every morning at five-thirty, I climbed up into that cab in the dark. And the gloves were there on the dash.
And I said good morning to them. Like a fool.
Then I waited for planting.
I should explain that part. Because Theresa asked me about it more than once.
“Call him,” she said, around the tenth of April. We were at supper. “Tell him you’ll put the crop in. He’d pay you. He’d be glad to.”
“He knows my number.”
“That’s pride.”
“Some of it is.”
“What’s the rest?”
I set down my fork.
“If I call him and offer, then I’m the hired man asking for work on my own father’s place. I planted that pivot twenty-two springs in a row. I’m not going to beg to plant it the twenty-third. If he wants me, all he has to do is ask. One sentence. I’d be in the field by dark.”
She didn’t say anything to that.
She got up and cut me a second piece of pie. That was her way of saying she thought I was wrong, and she was going to let me find it out myself.
The ground under that pivot is a silt loam that warms up slow. Dad never put a seed in it until the soil was fifty degrees at four inches deep, at seven in the morning, three days running. He kept a soil thermometer on a nail in the shop just for that.
He kept everything else in a little green pocket notebook. Planter settings. Seed population. Which nozzle package was on the pivot. How the well was pumping. Which tower liked to stick.
The soil hit fifty the last week of April.
Butch Sedlacek, who farms the section just east of Dad’s, had his planter rolling on the twenty-eighth. I know because I filled his dry spreader that week.
He climbed down out of his tractor while I was running the auger and stood next to the tender with his thumbs hooked in his bib pockets.
Butch is seventy-three. He and Dad shared a fence line for forty-six years. And they argued across it for all forty-six.
“Anybody in your dad’s fields?” he asked.
“Not that I’ve seen.”
“You going to be?”
“Haven’t been asked.”
Butch looked at me. He has a way of looking at you that feels like being weighed on the scale at the elevator.
“Two of a kind,” he said. Then he shook his head. “No. Three of a kind. Him and the both of you.”
He spat in the dirt.
“It’s a wonder anything ever got said in that house.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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