The Green Ledger And My Eighty Acres

Rain Coming

Tyler started planting corn on my eighty the first Saturday in May.

He had a six-row planter he had bought at an auction for twenty-eight hundred dollars and gone clear through over the winter in his grandmother’s barn. Six rows is slow. That is about eight acres an hour when everything goes right, and you have to stop and fill.

They had put his grandmother’s forty in on Friday. Hannah took the day off from school to run seed out to him. Saturday they pulled onto mine at first light, and I drove by twice and pretended I was going somewhere.

They were pushing, because the man on the radio was saying rain by midnight and then a week of it. Everybody in the county was in the field. You could see dust in every direction.

At a quarter after six Saturday evening my phone rang and it was Hannah, and she was trying so hard to sound all right that I had my shoes on before she finished.

Don drove. When we got to the fence corner the planter was sitting dead in the field, about two thirds of the way across, and Tyler was on his back under it.

A bearing had gone out on the drive shaft and twisted the shaft with it. He crawled out and showed me the piece. It looked like a licorice stick.

“Parts counter closed at five,” he said. “I called the after-hours number. They do not stock it for a planter this old. Monday out of Norfolk, if I am lucky.”

“How much is left?”

“Thirty acres.” He looked at the sky. In the west it had gone the color of a bruise, way down low. “If it rains the week they are saying, that thirty goes in three weeks late, or it goes to beans. I gave you my word, Mrs. Dunne. I am sorry. I should have had a spare.”

“Nobody keeps a spare drive shaft, son,” Don said.

Don called two farmers he delivers to. Both were still planting their own and would be until the rain ran them out.

Hannah was sitting on the tailgate with her arms wrapped around herself. There were seed bags stacked beside her, twelve of them, with nowhere to go.

I thought about calling Gene. I will tell you plainly why I did not. I had taken that ground away from him in front of the whole county. I did not have the right to ask him to save it.

So we stood there. Four people and a broken planter and the light going.

It was Don who heard it first. He turned his head toward the east, toward the home place.

A big diesel, working up through the gears.

It came across my brother’s eighty and through the gate in the fence line, the gate our father hung, with every light on it burning. A green tractor with duals and a sixteen-row planter folded up behind it like a great bird.

Tyler took his cap off. I do not think he knew he did it.

Gene pulled up alongside the dead planter and unfolded. He climbed down. He did not look at me. He walked to the back, opened a lid on one of his seed boxes, and tipped it so Tyler could see.

It was empty. He had cleaned out every box before he came. He had come to plant another man’s seed.

“What population are you running?” Gene said. It was the first thing I had heard him say to anybody in my family since October.

“Thirty-two thousand,” Tyler said.

“What depth?”

“Two inches.”

Gene nodded and went to set his planter.

And that was every word there was. Tyler and Don carried bags and poured. Hannah held the flashlight. Gene got up in the cab and found Tyler’s last row by the marker line, and laid his first pass down next to it so close you could not tell, later, where one man stopped and the other began.

Sixteen rows at a time. What would have taken Tyler four hours took my brother an hour and twenty minutes.

Don and I stood at the fence corner and watched the lights go back and forth.

“There is your brother,” Don said.

I could not answer him.

He finished at a quarter to ten. He folded up. He stopped beside Tyler’s pickup with the cab door open, and Tyler went over, and I saw Tyler reach up his hand and I saw Gene take it.

Then he drove home through Dad’s gate, and Don got out and shut it behind him.

The rain started at ten after midnight. I lay in bed under my new roof and listened to it on the shingles, and not one drop came through.