Mrs. Unruh took the old seed corn cap in both hands and set it upside down on the porch table between the peach cobbler and the iced tea pitcher, as one sets down a basket of eggs. It had been red and white once, with a cracked bill and a sweat stain the color of tea, and something heavy shifted inside it with a soft clink. She is twenty six, round faced, the daughter of a banker, with a plain gold band, and beside her stood her husband Caleb, tall and sunburned, with a hand on her back. “Mr. Craig,” she said, “my father says you are the best insurance man in the county. We came to tell you what you missed.”
Craig stood on the porch with his Busch Light, fifty, in a pressed golf shirt tucked into pressed jeans, and the toast he had given about Tucker still rang around the beams. He had said that his receptionist made more than Tucker and did not have to lift a fifty pound bag. The whole porch had laughed. Tucker had taken a bite of bierock. At the rail, the father of Mrs. Unruh, who banks the agency of Craig, stood looking at his shoes. “Mrs. Unruh, I am glad to see you,” said Craig, a little too loudly. “But if this is about a claim, my office is open on Monday.”
“In April,” said Caleb, “my father had a stroke on the tractor. We had five hundred acres to plant and two weeks to do it. I was in the hospital in Wichita beside him. The final planting date on the policy your agency wrote was the twentieth. After that, no seed, no coverage. We called your office for an extension. A young lady said it was not possible. We called again. The answer was the same.” He turned his own cap in his hands. “We thought we would lose the farm.”
An old faded seed corn cap sat upside down on a porch table at a harvest supper and gave one grandmother the length of a cobbler to bring her son in law back to her grandson.
“On the fifth day, a truck came down our road,” said Mrs. Unruh. “A kid I had met twice at the co op counter. He said, Mrs. Unruh, I heard about your father in law. I have a drill I can borrow and a week of weekends. He drove our own tractor all night with the headlights on. He planted five hundred acres in six days, his weekends and his vacation days, and told no one at the co op. When I carried him a sandwich, he was asleep on the seat with his cap over his face.” She nodded at the table. “He left that behind. I have kept it since April.”
“It came up,” said Caleb. “We harvested last week, and it is the best stand on our road. If Tucker had not planted, the policy would have lapsed. My father in law would have lost the home place.” Mrs. Unruh tipped the cap. Out onto the cloth slid a brass key on a loop of seed corn string, a folded paper, and a thick stack of checks held with a rubber band. “Forty one farmers gave,” she said. “Every old man Tucker has planted for in six springs. Thirty eight thousand nine hundred dollars. And a twelve row planter, nearly new, from a sale in Salina. The title is in his name.”
Tucker had not moved. He is twenty six, thin and freckled, with the hands of a much older man. “I did not do it for pay,” he said hoarsely. “We are not paying you,” said Mrs. Unruh. “We are saying thank you the oldest way we know, which is to pass a hat.” Across the porch Craig had set down his beer. He had gone a color I had never seen on him. “Mrs. Unruh,” he said quietly. “My office denied your request.” “Yes,” she said. “I wrote that policy. My receptionist took the call. I had told her to say no to every request for an extension, because it kept things clean.” He swallowed. “It was my rule.”
I am the grandmother of Tucker, and I have waited a long time to say a hard thing in a quiet voice. I told Craig that he would write a new rule. A hardship extension of thirty days, for any farmer with a medical emergency, read and decided by a human being and not a receptionist. That he would match the checks in the cap, dollar for dollar. And that in April, on a Saturday, he would spend twelve hours on a tractor beside Tucker, planting the field of an old farmer who could no longer climb into the seat. “I get carsick on a porch swing,” said Craig weakly. The whole porch, at last, laughed.
He drove a tractor in April for twelve hours, with a seed corn cap on his head that Mrs. Unruh had lent him, and he kept a straight row until the third pass, and then he did not. He found a ditch. He found it twice. An old woman of eighty eight named Miss Agnes waved from her porch at noon with a thermos, and at two he cried, quietly, behind the dust, when she said it was the field of her husband and that no one had planted it since he passed. By the end of the day he had a sunburn in the shape of a collar.
Tucker is in his own business now, three days a week at the co op and the rest on the road with his planter. His customers pay what they can. The Unruhs bring a check every fall. The match from Craig seeded a fund called First Seed, for farmers laid up with an injury, and the hardship rule of his agency has a name in the book of rules. They call it the Tucker Rule. Craig sends a copy to every agent in the state with a note on top in his own hand that says only, Read this.
At the next harvest supper, on the same porch, Craig stood with a glass of lemonade, and I gripped the rail. “To Tucker,” he said. “Who knows when to plant.” My grandson, in his good shirt, bowed his head. On a nail beside the door hangs the old faded cap, cleaned of nothing, with the sweat stain and the cracked bill and the brass key looped around the strap. Under it, someone has written, with a marker on the board of the porch, Forty one names, and a date in April.
