The father of Amber is named Dr. Peter Lindqvist, and he is a dentist in Fargo who has never once raised his voice to me, and he opened the white envelope with a fingernail as if he were prying a molar. Inside was a single page. He unfolded it and read it with his glasses on his forehead, and the clock on the wall ticked three times before he spoke. “Red River Lumber,” he said. “Sale to a national building supply company. Purchase price, six million, nine hundred thousand dollars.” He took off his glasses and looked at me. “Elmer. You sold the yards. All three of them.” I told him I had in September. All forty four employees were working still.
He had half risen from his chair, a hot, flushed man of forty eight with the chin of his mother, and the Grain Belt can was trembling in his fist. “Dad,” he said. “Dad, six point nine million? Why did you not tell me?” “Because you told me the lumber yards were finished,” I said. “You told me that Menards ate them alive. I thought, either he is right, and I should sell, or he is wrong, and I should see why he wants me to think so.” I looked at the printout of the USDA, lying in the middle of the hotdish. “Now I know why. A dying business does not ask about the land.”
Amber had not said a word since the printout. She sat with it in her lap. At last she lifted her eyes. “Kevin,” she said. “Twenty seven thousand, six hundred dollars. For three years.” Her voice was not loud. “I asked you in March why we could not afford to take the boys to the Black Hills. You said we were too tight. You said the lumber business had cleaned out your father, and we had to help.” She set down the page. “I put my own savings into that. I put in eleven thousand dollars.”
A yellow envelope with a printout from the government lay beside a white one on a supper table and gave one lumber man the evening to bring his son back to the land.
Kevin stared at her. For a long moment, I thought he might break the table. Then something went out of him, and he sank into his chair and put his big hands over his head, and I saw a boy I knew, a seven year old at the edge of the pond with a broken kite. “I did not know where else to turn,” he said. “I took out a loan for the fishing tournament series, two years ago, and I thought I would win. Three buy ins. Then I owed a man in Fargo.” Dr. Lindqvist looked at him with an expression I recognized: the face of a father who has been told, over many years, that all was well. “How much?” he said.
Kevin named a figure. It was forty one thousand dollars, with interest, to a lender who did not have an office. Amber made a small sound of despair, and her father reached over and took her hand. “Elmer,” he said, “I am going to say something now that you may not enjoy. I think my daughter should leave this table. I think she should go home to her boys, and I think this should be settled between you two men.” Amber shook her head. “No, Dad,” she said. “I am staying.”
I told them what would happen. I did not enjoy it. The USDA would be told the truth on Monday, by me, with a letter, and the payments would go to my own account from now on. The land, two hundred acres of grass and pheasants, would not be signed over, to Kevin or to anybody. It would go into a trust, in the name of his sons, my grandsons, to be held until each reached twenty five. I would pay the man in Fargo, in full, through a lawyer. Kevin would repay me, every dollar, by working. “You are going to run the north yard,” I said. “For the new owners. At a wage. For as long as it takes.”
He nodded, still hiding his face. When he lowered his hands, I saw that he was a man of middle age in a quilted vest with the beginnings of gray in his beard. “Dad,” he said, “you could have had me arrested.” “I could,” I said. “I thought about it. I thought about it for most of a week. And then I remembered the flood.” He looked up. “In 1997,” I said, “when the river came into the yard and took everything, you were sixteen. You waded through the water in the dark with a flashlight to carry the cash box out to the truck. You never asked for a dollar. I have never forgotten it. That boy is still in there, somewhere.”
Amber came around the table. She did not speak. She wrapped her arms around me, and I smelled her shampoo, a clean, faint scent of apples, and she whispered into my collar, “Thank you for not giving up on him.” Behind her, Dr. Lindqvist stood and carried his plate to the sink, and ran the water, and stood with his back to us for a minute longer than the plate required. When he turned, I saw his eyes were wet. He said to nobody, “It is a good hotdish. I have always said so.” And we laughed, all of us, in that cold kitchen, as the snow came down on the glass.
Kevin worked the north yard for two years. In October of that year, he drove out to the conservation land with his two sons in the back of his truck, and he stopped on the gravel road at the edge of the grass, and the three of them got out and stood in the wind. A pheasant went up from the field with a clatter, a rooster, copper and green, and the boys cheered. Kevin watched it all the way across the sky. “Dad,” he said into the phone, “you should see this.”
I did. I drove out the next day with a thermos. I parked by the fence and walked along the edge of the field, slowly, with my cane, and the grass was golden and rattling in the dry wind. I thought of Marlys, who used to say the wind in Grand Forks never quits. She was right, I decided. But there are worse things than a wind that never quits. There is a man who never turns up. In the distance, small and bright against the gray sky, I saw my son and his boys, walking the fence line together, and Kevin had his arm across the shoulders of the smaller one.
