The Shed That Earned Its Keep

The Schmidt brothers

I work four days a week at the farm store out on the truck bypass. I run the front counter and I know where everything is, which is most of the job.

The second week of October, two young men came in for grease cartridges, a case of hydraulic fluid and every box of mouse bait we had on the shelf. Dusty to the eyebrows, sunflower chaff on their caps.

“That’s a lot of mouse bait,” I said.

“We’ve got a lot of mice,” the older one said. “Or we’re about to.”

His name was Kurt Schmidt. His brother was Joel. They ran a custom harvest crew from up by Onida, two combines and two trucks, wheat from Oklahoma to the Canadian line every summer and sunflowers and corn around home every fall. Their dad had done it before them.

“We wintered the machines in a man’s shed up by Agar for six years,” Kurt said. “He sold out in August. New owner wants it for his own.”

“So where do they go?”

“Right now? Under the sky.” He said it like a man describing a death in the family. “Two combines. I can’t leave them out. Mice get in the wiring and a harness will run you three thousand dollars, and that’s before the snow gets in the bearings.”

I rang up the grease.

“How tall a door do you need?” I said.

They both looked at me.

“Fourteen foot,” Kurt said slowly. “Thirteen and a half if I fold the tank extensions down. Twenty wide if I want to keep the paint on the duals.”

“I’ve got fifteen by thirty,” I said. “On both ends.”

Joel set the mouse bait down on the counter.

They came out that Saturday. It was one of those October days we get before it turns, bright and still, sixty degrees, the cottonwoods along the creek gone to gold.

I walked them in the walk door on the south end and stood back and let them look.

They looked at the wagon, crossways. They looked at the old aluminum boat. They looked down the west wall at the camper and the good boat under its blue cover, and Len’s workbench beyond that, and then they looked at the north half. Sixty feet of bare concrete with a tractor in one corner and sunlight coming through the skylight panels in long dusty bars.

“Whose is all this up front?” Kurt asked.

“My brother’s.”

“He farm?”

“He’s retired from the highway department. He lives in town.”

“Ma’am, we can’t get past that wagon.”

“You won’t need to,” I said. “Come look at the other door.”

It took Kurt an hour. He cut the elm off at the ground with a hand saw from his pickup, dug the track out with a spade and a putty knife, shot the rollers full of the grease I had sold him, and then he and Joel put their shoulders to it. That door groaned like something waking up. Then it rolled, both leaves, all thirty feet, and the whole north end of Len’s shed opened onto the hay ground and the light came in.

I had not seen it open since Len’s funeral. I had to turn around for a minute and look at the tractor.

“How do you get a combine to it?” I asked, when I could.

“Across your hay ground, if you’ll let us, after it freezes. We go in once in November and come out once in April. We’ll stay off it when it’s soft and we’ll fix any rut we leave.”

“That’s fair.”

It was more than fair. A combine on tires as tall as I am can cross frozen hay ground twice a year. It was the daily trip in a car that ground would never stand for.

“What do you want for it?” Kurt said.

“Seven hundred a month,” I said. “For half. But let’s find out where half is.”

Len kept a hundred foot tape on a nail by his workbench, the kind with a crank. The case was rusty but the blade was good. Joel hooked the end on the north door track and walked it south, and I held the reel, the dumb end, like I had held it for Len a thousand times.

“Sixty feet puts me right here,” Joel called. He was standing about a foot and a half short of the wagon. “Half the building, even.”

“Mark it.”

He and Kurt snapped a chalk line across the concrete from the east wall to the west wall, bright blue, sixty feet from each door.