The Glass Her Mother Handed Me

“She’s going to be awful about that later,” she said.

“Probably.”

“I don’t care.”

“You care a little.”

“I care a little.” She wiped under one eye with her knuckle. Then she turned her chair so it faced me square. “Okay. Seed cleaning. Dustin can’t explain it. I’ve asked him twice, and he says, you put seed in one end and it comes out cleaner. I want to know how.”

I looked at her to see if she was being polite.

She was not. She had her chin in her hand.

So I told her.

I told her how a load comes in off the field with everything in it. Stems, pods, dirt clods, bug parts, morning glory seed, cocklebur. How it goes over the air screen first, which is just what it sounds like, screens that shake and a fan that blows, so the big trash rides off the top and the small trash falls through and the light trash floats away.

“Like panning for gold,” she said.

“Backwards. We keep the middle.”

I told her about the gravity table, which is a tilted deck that vibrates with air coming up through it, so the heavy, sound seed walks uphill and the light, sick seed drifts down. I told her you can stand at that table and watch a river of soybeans sort itself by weight, and it still gets me after thirty years.

I told her about the color sorter, which has cameras that look at every single seed as it falls, and a puff of air that knocks out the purple ones and the green ones faster than you can blink.

“Every seed?”

“Every one. A few thousand a second.”

“That’s more attention than I can give a kid in the emergency room,” she said.

She asked what happens to what gets screened out. I told her it goes for feed. She asked how I know the seed will grow, and I told her about germination tests, a hundred seeds rolled in a wet paper towel and counted in a week, and that I have still got the first one Ray and I ever ran, pressed in the family Bible. Ninety-four out of a hundred.

She asked who Ray was. I told her.

She asked if it was hard, after. I told her that too.

We sat there an hour and ten minutes. I know because the waitress came by three times and Kristen sent her away three times. Inside the French doors I could see the big table, Pam’s green dress, people standing up and sitting down. Twice her mother looked out at us through the glass.

Kristen never looked back.

“Can I tell you something?” she said, near the end. “My grandpa farmed. My mom’s dad. Four hundred acres outside Pana, corn and beans and some hogs. She grew up in a house with one bathroom. She has not said the word Pana out loud at this club in thirty years.”

I thought about that. I thought about a young woman deciding one day that where she came from was something to scrub off, and then scrubbing for three decades.

“That would wear a person out,” I said.

“I used to think it was just who she was.” Kristen turned her water glass in a slow circle. “I think maybe it’s who she’s scared of being.”

“Those are usually the same thing, honey. Till somebody lets you put it down.”

She looked at me then for a while.