“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.
