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Show Red, he asked, what are your plans? Dunno, my father answered, go to Nebraska maybe, an answer that surprised him as he spoke it, coming from some deep and inarticulate space inside but arriving as familiar as the schoolhouse itself. College? he answered. You 're not Jerry. I know, my father said, ready to explain the still-forming idea of studying business, maybe to return to the farm, maybe not. You 're a farmer, Red, like your father. You will never be more than that. Ever. The teacher, a man perhaps who saw student after student return to the farm, who maybe had long ago given up hope that any would leave, or maybe just a man whose own failures caused him to want the same for those around him, turned, anxious to return to the ceremony, leaving my father with a future of corn and soil, the same corn and soil that had bankrupted his father and left the family teetering on the edge of neediness. Taught to respect teachers, the idea of a physical response to this man's assessment of his future never occurred to him. Instead he would spend his entire life finishing the conversation. While he had been contemplating following Jerry to college, at that moment, faced with a man insisting he had limits, he vowed never to work a field again. He had been raised to be a farmer. And even though the land his family owned would never support the four boys once they were men, no thought was given to being anything else. My grandfather never finished fourth grade. My grandmother had only a few more years of education. What they had was land, a legacy of soil. My father became the second child to graduate from college and the first to earn a law degree as well as a Master's in maritime law. Each course completed, each honor 26 |