I worked the lid off and looked down inside, and I had to sit down on the workbench, because the can was full of wheat.
Seed wheat. Grain, dry and whole and clean, filling that OIL can most of the way to the top, and nested down in the middle of it, wrapped in waxed paper, a little cloth pouch and a folded note. I ran the wheat through my fingers, and it was not like the wheat you see riding to the elevator around here now. The kernels were longer, darker, a deep hard red, an old kind, a kind I did not recognize at all.
The note was in Grandpa hand, but older, the ink faded, like he had written it years and years back and just kept it in there. It told the whole thing. That wheat came off the boat. His own father, my great-great-grandfather, carried a double handful of seed wheat sewn into the lining of his coat when he left Russia in nineteen and eleven. A hard red wheat his people had grown on the steppe for a hundred years. Drought wheat. Winter wheat. The wheat that fed them through famines that emptied whole villages. He brought it across an ocean sewn into his coat because he could not bring anything else, and he planted it on the Dakota prairie, and it grew, and it fed this family and helped settle this whole county.
And when the big seed companies came, and everybody switched over to the new hybrids, the modern stuff, my grandpa could not stand to let the old family wheat die out. So every single year, on a little corner plot, quiet, he grew out just enough of the ancestor seed to keep it alive and true, and he saved it back in that OIL can up on his shelf, and he did it for sixty years so that nobody would talk him out of wasting good ground on an old-fashioned grain.
This is the seed that came in your great-great-grandfather coat across the whole world. As long as somebody grows it, he is not all the way gone, and neither am I. Do not let it die out, if you can help it.
I sat in that quiet workshop with a hundred years of my own family running through my fingers. All my life that can just said OIL. All my life I reached right past it. And it held the living seed a frightened young man once sewed into his coat and carried out of a dying country to build us all a place to stand.
I carried a coffee can of it to the agriculture college here in Grand Forks, to the people who keep the heritage grains, and they about lost their minds. It is a real variety, near gone from the world, and they are going to grow it out proper and keep it safe and study it. And I kept back enough to plant myself. This fall I am putting my great-great-grandfather wheat back in Dakota ground with my own two hands, a hundred and some years after he first did, so the old man in the OIL can gets to be right. As long as somebody grows it, he is not all the way gone. I aim to keep somebody growing it a long, long time.