…and operating the old hay hoist, with one hand on the lever and a toothpick in his mouth. The rope ran from the loft pulley down to my father, who was standing on the dirt floor with the line wound twice around both wrists to keep a two hundred pound bale from swinging. The engine of the hoist was roaring so loudly that neither of them heard me come in. I did not stop to think. I threw my weight against the main switch on the wall and the barn went silent, all at once, except for the creak of the beam and the slow sway of the bale above the head of my father.
Dad dropped to his knees, and I got the rope off his wrists with my pocketknife before I even said a word. The skin underneath was raw red, the color of beef. “Travis, you were not supposed to be here until Sunday,” he said, and he tried to smile, and could not. My brother in law, Dwight, climbed down the loft ladder with his hands up. “Hey now, hold on, it is not what it looks like,” he said. “Your dad insisted. He likes to feel useful.” I looked at the eighty one year old man whose hands I was holding, and at the thirty bales stacked beside him, and at the chart on the wall that said WEEK ONE, WEEK TWO.
Kim pulled up in her truck a few minutes later, humming along to the radio, and the humming stopped when she saw my face. My sister is fifty two and she has run that farm for ten years, since her husband first got the idea of renting the hay fields out. “Travis, what on earth,” she began. “Kim, how many weeks has Dad been working here?” I asked. “He comes to visit,” she said. “He wants to help. We pay him in room and board.” I pointed to the hands of Dad, then to the schedule. “You pay him in blisters,” I said. “Nobody invited Dad to a vacation. He was a farmhand with no wages.”
A coil of hay rope hung on a barn nail gave one son the weekend to bring his father back to the porch in Lubbock.
I laid out my terms on the dirt floor of that barn, with the engine still ticking as it cooled. Dad was leaving with me that very afternoon, with his suitcase, his medicine and his good hat. Kim and Dwight would hire two real hands for the haying season and pay them honestly. The weeks that Dad had worked would be paid out at fourteen dollars an hour, which came to nine thousand, six hundred dollars, and it would go into an account in his name. And on his next visit, Dad would be given the porch swing, a glass of iced tea and the cows to look at, from a distance.
Dad cleared his throat. He has not made a speech since my mother passed, but he made one then, standing in the barn light with a rope burn on each wrist. “Kimberly, I never minded the work,” he said. “I minded that nobody asked. I thought if I said no, you would stop wanting me around.” His voice shook. “I would rather be wanted than comfortable, honey. But I would like to be wanted for something besides my back.” My sister put one hand over her mouth. Nobody said a word for a long moment. A swallow flew in through the big door, circled the rafters and flew out again.
Kim sat down on a hay bale and cried the way she did when she was nine and had lost her calf. Dwight stood beside her and, to his credit, did not make another excuse. “Mr. Travis, I thought we were helping him,” he said at last. “I thought a man like your dad needed a job. I forgot to ask what kind.” I let him stand there with it. My father got up slowly, laid a hand on his shoulder, and said, “Dwight, you are not a bad man. You just stopped paying attention.” That was the kindest verdict I have ever heard, and it landed harder than a shout.
We drove home on the back roads, with the windows down and the wheat fields shining. Dad dozed against the glass for the first hour. Somewhere near Plainview, he woke up, looked out at the horizon and began to talk. He told me about the year he and Mama drove to Colorado in a borrowed truck, and about the night a hailstorm took out half their cotton and they sat on the porch eating peaches from the can. I did not say much. I only drove, and listened, and wondered how many stories I had missed by assuming he was too tired to tell them.
The money consequences came quickly and fairly. Kim and Dwight hired a young couple from Slaton for the haying season at a proper wage, and the farm actually ran better, because the couple knew how to maintain the equipment. They wired the nine thousand, six hundred dollars into the account of Dad that week, with a long letter. Dad opened a savings account at the credit union and bought himself a new pair of work boots, and he insisted on paying for lunch at the diner for everybody on the day he deposited the first check.
In the name of my mother, Edna Marie, who passed six years ago and who kept the books for that farm without ever being paid, I started the Edna Porch Fund. It pays for fair wages, safety gear and a hired hand for older farmers and family helpers in Lubbock and Hale counties who cannot say no to their own kin. In the first year, we placed twenty three farmhands on small family farms. A rancher of seventy nine, still shaking from a tractor accident, held out his hat to a young hand and said, “Son, would you mind if I just watched?”
The next July, Dad drove himself to the farm in his old Ford, wearing a straw hat I had never seen. I followed in my truck, because I did not trust either of them. Kim met him at the gate with a pitcher of lemonade and a folding chair, and she set it in the shade of the barn, facing the cows. Dad sat down. He took off his boots. For two hours, he watched the cattle graze, and talked to my sister about her kids, and when she was not looking, he reached down and scratched the ears of the old farm dog.