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’d 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.”
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