Dad Poet Society

It was hard for me when I was young to understand the pain my father felt. It was little different than the pain that any father farmer felt as he watched nature playing savage tricks upon his more-or-less half-section farm.

There used to be a fence neatly dividing the north half of Section 36 from Dad’s half, but North Dakota winds long ago had dumped their tons of middle-Minnesota soil on that fence line and made it disappear. That dividing line became a combination of gentleman’s agreements and who plowed first and furthest north and south between old man Monquette and Dad. Once, when we re-fenced the farm, three sides were silver new barbed wire on Kelly-green new neatly-rowed steel posts. But on the north, old man Monquette insisted on the cheaper posts, untreated wood. If Dad felt any resentment at the job but two-thirds rightly done, he never showed it.

Just like he really never showed the anger that he must have felt standing silent, staring westward on the porch, as thunderheads rolled dryly past, sharing not a single drop with desperately dry and dying crops. He’d watch until all hope of rain was gone, and then wordlessly sit down to a wordless supper. So many times I wanted him to swear or scream or cry, but he never did.

I remember once sitting huddled in his arms, as far from windows as we could get, shivering and listening as the hail pounded spring-toothed flat the oats that had been binder-ready for the next day, and the corn in which a child of six could easily have gotten lost just an hour before. To keep his family fed that fall, he drove his picking rig as far away as Tyler. We never saw him much that fall. Maybe he yelled or cried then. I don’t know, but I don’t think so.

I cried that Sunday that our bull died, that animal that was to inject new life into our herd, and for which we had paid just twice what any animal should be worth. Just bloated up and died that Sunday. The rendering works left a five-inch rain gauge. Nature filled it only once, and left the alfalfa field south of the house a lake big enough to sail on for the better part of a year. When the bull died, I was fourteen, and I cried. But not Dad.

When it came time to sell the farm, none of Dad’s six sons wanted to inherit all that pain. We all expected that the sadness would finally show, but in its place there shone relief. I guess we really never understood that Dad had never truly loved the land. Oh, he respected it all right, enough to let it go to someone else, to let him fight with it a while, until time came for him to pass it on.

Dad knew, and we learned from him, that with the land you never win. But you don’t lose either. You fight and fight, and live, and live some more, and grow.