Part Six: Dirt

Two days later, Mama called me.

I was in the barn, changing the oil in the little Ford. My hands were black to the wrist. I wiped one on a rag and answered.

“Laney,” Mama said. “Are you charging your sister to get married on the farm?”

I stopped wiping my hands.

“No, Mama,” I said. “I asked her to pay a rental company for two tents.”

“She called me crying,” Mama said. “Last night. For an hour.”

I didn’t say anything.

“She said you’re charging family,” Mama said.

She paused.

“She said you’re charging family for dirt.”

Dirt.

I sat down slow on the step of the barn.

The concrete was cold through my jeans. The barn swallows were going in and out of the hayloft door over my head. Out past the lane, I could see the bottom forty, green and tall, the first heads of timothy just starting to show.

Dirt.

That dirt fed us when Dad quit.

That dirt paid for my school clothes and Megan’s braces and the electric bill every month for twenty-five years. That dirt bought Megan’s prom dress. That dirt paid for her first car, a used Honda Civic Grandpa found on a lot in Lewisburg.

That dirt was fifty-one years of my grandfather’s hands.

I didn’t say anything for a long time.

“Maybe be the bigger person, Laney,” Mama said. “You’re the one who got it.”

You’re the one who got it.

There it was.

I didn’t yell.

I wanted to. Believe me. I wanted to tell Mama about the twelve thousand dollars in first-cutting hay. I wanted to tell her about the two days of bush-hogging and the dead cedar and the groundhog hole.

I wanted to ask her if Megan had told her about the eleven thousand dollars Grandpa left her. And the gold watch.

I didn’t.

“Okay, Mama,” I said. “I’ll take care of it.”

Part Seven: Decent and Doormat

I paid the fourteen hundred that night.

I called Bedford County Party Rentals and gave them my credit card number over the phone. The woman thanked me. She said the tents would be delivered the Friday before the wedding.

I hung up and sat at my kitchen table for a long time.

I wasn’t going to let two tents ruin her wedding. I couldn’t. It was my sister. My only sister.

When we were little, after Dad left, she used to crawl into my bed every night. For two years. She’d put her cold feet on my legs and whisper, Is Daddy coming back?

I’d tell her no. Then I’d tell her it was okay. Then I’d tell her stories until she fell asleep.

But I wasn’t going to swallow the whole thing either.

Not the word dirt. Not charging family. Not you’re the one who got it.

Grandpa Earl used to say something. When somebody tried to take advantage of him. A neighbor who wanted to borrow the baler and never brought it back. A cattle buyer who tried to short him on weight.

He’d stand there with his hands in his pockets and say, real quiet, “Decent is one thing. Doormat is another.”

Then he’d politely go get his baler back.

Decent is not the same as doormat.

I sat at my kitchen table and looked out the window at the bottom forty.

At the timothy standing tall. At the place by the farmhouse where the arbor would go.

And I thought about something.

The field had a voice.

You just had to cut it.