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.”
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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