Scratched into the underside of the flat fieldstone, in the cramped capital letters I would have known anywhere, were seven words. L. FETTIG. AUG 1984. FORGIVE ME. FATHER. Dan Moen read them over my shoulder, kneeling in the dust of the sunflower field with his hat in his hand, and neither of us said anything for a long moment. The wind moved through the great yellow heads above us. A meadowlark called somewhere. I had walked past that stone for forty years, and my husband had walked past it every spring of his life.
The word at the end was the one that undid me. Erling had not written it for himself. It was meant for his father, old Anders Solberg, who had died in 1996 and whom I had known as a stern and quiet farmer with a long gray braid of silence. I sat back on my heels and looked at the bare patch of earth, and I understood at once what had happened. This was no crime of my husband. It was something his father had done, and Erling had carried it alone.
The sheriff arrived at noon with a backhoe and a young forensic man from the state, and they took a day and a half to do it properly. By the second afternoon, they had found him. The remains lay under three feet of black soil, wrapped in a canvas feed sack and a worn quilt, with a cheap watch still on the wrist bone. The forensic man gently lifted a small leather wallet from beneath the cloth. In it was a driver license issued to Lyle Edward Fettig, born 1962, with a face I recognized from an old poster.
A farm remembers everything a family wishes to forget, and one day it offers up the truth with the plain courtesy of the soil.
The story came out over the next weeks, in pieces. A letter from Anders, found in the drawer of a rolltop desk in the attic, was addressed to Erling and sealed with candle wax. Erling must have found it after his father died and left it unopened for years. In it, Anders wrote that on the third of August, 1984, Lyle Fettig had been driving the grain auger when the power takeoff shaft caught his sleeve.
It was a terrible accident. Anders had been in the field with him. The boy died in his arms before the ambulance could be called.
Anders had panicked. His farm was in debt. He had been told that if a hired man died on his property, the insurance would be cancelled and the bank would call his loans. He had thought of his wife, his son, his sixty acres. So he had carried the boy to the corner of the field under cover of night, dug a grave, and driven the car of Lyle to the bus depot in Bismarck. He wrote that he had been a coward, and that he had regretted it every day for twelve years.
Erling had read the letter at nineteen. He kept it. He marked the grave with a stone, plowed carefully around it every spring for forty years, and never told me. I thought of the quiet man I had married, who loved sunflowers and bad coffee and the sound of rain on the roof. I understood now why he had planted a field of flowers where passersby could take pictures. He had been tending a grave, in the only way he could, with the most beautiful thing he knew how to grow.
The mother of Lyle was alive. Her name was Vera Fettig, ninety one years old, in a nursing home in Mandan, and she had placed an ad in the Tribune every August for twenty years. I drove there myself with Dan, carrying a bouquet of sunflowers on the seat beside me. She sat in a wheelchair by a window with a blue shawl around her shoulders. I knelt in front of her and told her everything, and when I finished, she put her thin hand on my cheek.
“All these years,” she said, in a voice like paper. “All these years, he was in the sun.” She wept, but there was peace in it. The sheriff closed the case as an accidental death with a concealed burial, and no one was charged, since both men who knew were gone. Vera asked only that her son be brought home to the cemetery in Mandan and laid beside his father. We held the funeral in September. The little church was full, and the hymns were the ones Lyle had sung as a boy.
The next August, I planted the whole field again, twelve acres, as Erling always did. This time I left the bare patch in the middle, and in it, I set a low wooden bench and a small sign. It says, in plain letters, For Lyle Fettig, who was loved. Take all the pictures you want. In the evenings, when the light comes in low across the flowers, the young couples and the old farmers and the school children come and sit there, quietly, for a minute, looking at the sun.