“I do.”
“Gonna call her back?”
“Not tonight,” I say. “Being a farmer now has already worn my ass out.”
“You’re about as much cut out for farming as your father was,” she says.
I give her a hug, holding her close for what feels like a long time.
“I’m too tired for any more talking today,” I say. “At least not if it’s about me.”
“You were never any good at that,” she says.
There is a sweet, serene quality to her, a calm, that has alwaysmade me feel safe. She was like that even in those first days at the hospital. It’s why her brief outburst at the table the night before had been so out of character for her.
My father had always told me I got my own calm from her.
“Now go get some sleep,” she says, and then adds, “Farmer man.”
Tonight, I do fall asleep right away, Bumper in her bed on the floor next to me, both of us sound asleep until the familiar nightmare wakes me again.
NINETEEN
CHARLIE’S SON, LES, who’d made the varsity team at Cross Rivers last season as a sophomore wide receiver, tells me on my third morning back that if I ever get an urge to throw a ball around after work, he’d not only be happy to do it with me, he’d consider it an honor.
He looks so much like his dad it’s as if he’d been cloned, and I can already see clear as day the man he’s on his way to becoming.
“I’ve always wanted to ask you something,” Les says. “Is it true you broke one of your own wide receiver’s hands with one of those bullet passes of yours at NC?”
“It was only a small fracture,” I say with a shrug.
“So do you want to maybe have a catch sometime?”
“Maybe when my shoulder gets a little stronger,” I say. “But for the time being, my pass-throwing days are over. Even my grandma says I’m just a simple country farmer now.”
“Only temporarily,” he says.
“Your lips,” I say. “God’s ears.”
I take a closer look at the kid’s wiry frame, maybe a couple of inches shy of six feet.
I’d once asked Charlie if his boy had enough talent for football and he’d said, “He might have a chance. All’s I know for sure is that nobody on that team will outwork him.”
“Not Charlie Hall’s boy,” I’d said.
“Either way, he’s got the same dream they all have around here,” Charlie said then. “He wants to be you.”
In this moment, though, the kid right in front of me, not all that much younger than I am, me knowing that a new season is going to start for him when summer is over, I know I’d give anything to be him.
“You all right there, Silas?” Les asks. “Looks like I lost you there for a second.”
“Right here,” I say. “Let’s go load some seed into that big-assed John Deere planter over there.” I give him a playful shove. “These days, all’s I am is the quarterback of the John Deere All-Stars.”
The planter is hitched to our second combine, just out of the shop itself, Charlie having driven it back from town. Out of sight of both of the Halls, I sneak around the barn and do some stretching, knowing the grunt work that’s about to begin and the world of hurt that will come with it once we start hefting those heavy bags.
“You sure you got this?” Charlie asks when the three of us are standing next to the combine, as if he’s reading my mind.
“Like they always say around these parts,” I tell him. “Sure as a cat’s got climbing gear.”
