**PART 2**
The harder part came the next morning.
I had forty cows of my own. I’d built that herd from six bred heifers Dad sold me at cost when I was twenty-nine. They’d always run on his creek pasture in the summer and his cornstalks in the winter. That was the deal between us. I drew a wage. I ran my cows on his grass. And I never once asked to see the books.
Now it was Phil’s grass. Phil’s stalks.
I hooked up the stock trailer and started hauling my cows home. Eight at a time.
It was the middle of calving season. You do not move cows in the middle of calving unless you absolutely have to.
Phil drove out from Omaha that Saturday and found me loading the fourth trip.
He stood at the lot gate in a brand-new canvas coat.
“You don’t have to do this. Leave them where they are.”
“They’re not yours to feed, Phil.”
“I’m not asking you to pay.”
“I know you’re not. That’s the trouble with it.”
He put both his hands on the top rail of the gate. He has our mother’s hands. Long in the fingers.
“What are you going to do for grass?”
“Rent some.”
“Wade.”
“I’ll rent some.”
I latched the trailer gate and drove out past him.
In the mirror, he was still standing at the rail. Behind him was the house. And in the kitchen window was the yellow curtain our mother hung in 1988.
I rented a half section of hill pasture north of Elba from a widow named Mrs. Nielsen. I’d helped her husband work calves for years before he passed.
Sixty-five dollars a pair, per month, for five months. Thirteen thousand dollars.
I shook her hand at her kitchen table. She made me take home a loaf of rye bread.
“Your dad was hard,” she said. “But he was honest.”
“Yes ma’am,” I said. “He was both.”
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.”
The first of May came. Then the fifth.
I drove the tender past the home place twice a day on the county road. Both fields just sat there in last year’s stalks, with nothing moving in them but blackbirds.
The phone didn’t ring.
On the ninth of May, it rained two inches.
On the twelfth, a Tuesday, I came over the hill with eight tons of dry fertilizer behind me. And there was a sixteen-row planter in the pivot quarter. Behind a tractor I didn’t know. With a pickup and a seed trailer parked at the end rows.
The pickup had Kansas plates.
Three days after two inches of rain. On that ground.
I slowed down.
I could see the shine in the tracks behind the planter, where the wheels were smearing the soil instead of crumbling it. I could see mud packing up on the gauge wheels. They were mudding it in.
Any man raised on that quarter could have told them to wait until Friday.
I could have turned in at the lane. I had my hand on the blinker.
Then I thought: he hired them.
He went looking for somebody to plant our father’s ground. And he looked right past me. All the way to Kansas.
I took my hand off the blinker.
I drove on to the Rasmussen place and unloaded.
I’m not proud of that. I’m telling it because it’s what I did.
That night I didn’t eat supper.
Theresa found me out in the feed truck, sitting in the dark with the driver’s door open.
“They put it in wet,” I said.
“Can it be fixed?”
“Some. Not by them.”
She stepped up on the running board and put her arm around my neck. We stayed like that a long time, with the yard light buzzing over us.
“He would hate this,” she said quietly. “Your dad. Not the corn. You two.”
“He’s the one that did it, Theresa.”
“I know he is. I still think he’d hate it.”
By the middle of June, that field was telling the whole story to anybody who drove past. And in our country, everybody drives past.
Corn planted right comes up like a church choir. Everybody the same height. Standing in straight rows.
This came up like a school picture. Knee high in one spot, four inches tall the next. Skips in the row as long as a man lying down. Then three plants crowded together in a clump. Yellow streaks where the roots couldn’t break out of a seed trench that had baked hard as a clay pot.
Nobody had put down a weed killer ahead of it, either. The waterhemp was coming up in a green haze between the rows.
And the pivot hadn’t turned once. It sat at the exact angle it had been parked at last September. With a flat tire on the fifth tower.
On the east eighty, they’d planted dryland corn at an irrigated population. Thirty-two thousand seeds to the acre, on ground that’ll only carry twenty-four thousand in a good year.
If July came in hot, every stalk out there was going to be fighting its neighbor for a drink of water.
