“It was,” I said. “It was my farm. Until the first of August.” I said it quietly, because there was a wedding band tuning up behind the DJ and a bride in a white dress sitting very still at the head table with her bouquet in her lap. “Eight hundred acres on Gratiot Road. Six harvesters. Forty trucks. Forty four people on the payroll, every one of whom still has a job.” I looked at the father of the bride, a trim man in a navy blazer named Paul Brandt, who owned three dental offices. “It sold to a landscaping supply company for six million, six hundred thousand dollars. That is the number on the page, Paul.”
The tent went still. The DJ, who seemed to be a man of some experience, lowered the volume on the speakers to a murmur and then to nothing. Greg stood at the front with the microphone in his hand like a man holding a snake. “Dad,” he said, in a strained voice. “I did not know you sold the farm.” I said, “No. You did not know a good many things about the farm, son. You did not come out after high school. You did not know where the keys were kept. You did not know the name of the man who ran my shop for twenty years.” I paused. “Luis. His name is Luis.”
“The harvester behind the pole barn,” I went on, “is not yours. It belongs to the company that bought the farm, and they have the serial number. The sod truck you took on Tuesday is also theirs. So is the forklift.” I held up my green hands, which I had not washed. “I came here today to hand your son a check for the down payment on a house. I laid your sod in my wedding suit because you asked me to, and because I did not want to make a scene at the wedding of my grandson. I want you to know that I did not mind. I would have laid a hundred pallets.”
A sheet of paper and a pair of grass stained knees stopped a wedding dance and gave one sod farmer the evening to bring his son back to the field.
Greg set the microphone down on the table. For a moment, nobody breathed. He is forty six, a trim man with a watch that cost more than my first tractor, and I watched the hand of the watch tremble. “I owe forty thousand to a guy in Bay City,” he said. “I lost my accounts last spring, Dad. They put me on probation at work. I thought I would start my own business. And I thought, if I sold the harvester, I would have the seed money, and you would never have to know.” He stared at his own shoes. “I did not know you sold the farm. I thought you were going broke.”
Tyler walked over from the head table. He is twenty six, tall, with the shoulders of my own father, and he was wearing a rented tuxedo with a boutonniere that had slipped sideways. He did not say a word to Greg. He stopped in front of me and took my green hands in both of his. “Grandpa,” he said, “I saw you from the window. You were on your knees, laying sod. And I thought, he is the only person here who is working.” He swallowed. “You taught me to drive the tractor. You taught me how to read a field. You never told me you were rich.” “I am not,” I said. “I am a farmer, son. I just happen to have a bank account.”
Paul Brandt had been standing with his arms folded. He unfolded them now. “Floyd,” he said, “I have been wondering for six months why my daughter loved this family. I thought it must be the boy.” He nodded at Tyler. “I think now it is the grandfather.” He took off his blazer, a small, strange, formal gesture, and laid it over the back of a chair. “I would be honored to shake your hand.” I took it. “And I am going to ask you to do me a favor, Mr. Haskins. I would like you to give the first toast.”
So I stood in the middle of that tent with the green still on my knees, and the microphone passed to me from a hand that had been shaking, and I raised a plastic cup of punch. I said I was not a speaker. I said that in 1978 I planted forty acres of bluegrass and the neighbors laughed. And I said that I hoped these two young people would be like grass: that they would put down roots wide and low, and survive being walked on, and grow back every spring, greener. Then I drank the punch, and the tent roared.
Afterwards, in the dusk behind the pole barn, Greg and I sat on the bumper of the harvester. He did not talk for a long time. Neither did I. “Dad,” he said finally, “what do I do?” I told him the harvester went back to the yard on Monday, with his own hands on the wheel. The forty thousand, I would pay to the man in Bay City, directly, on the condition that Greg tell his employer the truth. And if he wanted to start a business, I said, he could start one the way I did. With forty acres. Rented. From a stranger.
Greg did it. I will tell you that I did not believe he would. He rented forty acres of marginal ground from a neighbor on Gratiot Road, and in May he planted Kentucky bluegrass with a seeder he borrowed from the buyer of my own farm. He worked the field alone. I drove by every morning and saw him out there on the tractor, in jeans and a faded cap, his white collar gone, with the dust coming off the rows like smoke. The first week of June, he called me. “Dad,” he said, “it came up.” I could hear him smiling. “It is green.”
Tyler and his bride bought a little farmhouse outside Frankenmuth with the money from the check I had carried in my pocket. In September I stood on the porch with a cup of coffee and watched Greg unload a trailer of sod across the whole front yard, a gift, laid with his own hands, row by row, tight at the seams. When it was done, he came up the steps with grass on his knees. “How is it?” he asked. I looked at the lawn, which glowed in the evening sun like a green lake. “Not bad,” I said. “Not bad at all.” It was the best thing I ever said to him.
