I Farmed Beside Dad for 22 Years, but He Left All 400 Acres to My Brother Then Planting Season Exposed What the Will Couldn’t

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.”

I was greasing the feed truck that evening.

It was past eight o’clock and still light out. That long June light that makes everything look better than it is. I had the grease gun on the driveline when I heard tires on gravel.

It was Dad’s pickup. The blue three-quarter-ton with the cracked taillight.

For half a second, coming up my lane with the sun behind it, it was him.

Phil got out slowly. His new boots were muddy to the ankles.
He walked across the yard and stopped beside the running board of the feed truck. He looked up at the cab. At the windshield. I knew he could see the gloves.

Then my brother took off his cap.

I had never in my life seen him take his cap off to ask for anything. Not for a loan. Not for a girl. Not at our mother’s bedside.

“Wade,” he said. “I need to ask you something.”

I wiped my hands on a rag.

“Go ahead.”

“I don’t know what I’m looking at out there.” His voice was steady. But it cost him. I could hear it cost him. “I know it’s bad. I don’t know how bad. And I don’t know what to do first. Would you come look at it?”

Four months I’d waited for that sentence.

Some nights, I’d planned exactly what I’d say back. Most of it wasn’t very Christian.

But standing there, what I saw was a man in his fifties holding his cap in both hands in front of his little brother.

And I didn’t have a single one of those speeches left in me.

“Saturday,” I said. “I work till noon.”

He let his breath out.

“I’ll pay you. Whatever you say.”

“You’ll pay the co-op for the spray and the nitrogen. That’ll be enough of a bill.”

I hung the grease gun back on its nail.

“And Phil. I’ll look at it. I’m not saying anything more than that yet.”

“That’s fair.”

“Why Kansas?”

He turned the cap around once in his hands.

“Because they didn’t know me,” he said. “I couldn’t ask you. And everybody else around here would’ve known I hadn’t asked you.”

It was an honest answer.

It was also the exact same answer I’d given Theresa back in April. Just with the words turned around.

“Saturday,” I said again.

He nodded. He looked one more time at the windshield, at the gloves.

Then he drove our father’s pickup back down the lane.