The Half of the Wheat I Cut Myself
And then when I was fourteen he had stood up one afternoon in the middle of the north eighty, said, “Scoot over, I’m tired,” and sat down on the toolbox himself.
I ran that combine three summers. I was good at it, which nobody at the dental office would guess.
I sat down in the seat. The foam had gone to crumbs. I put my left hand on the wheel and my right on the hydro lever and my hand knew the shape of the knob before I did.
That was when I saw the ticket.
It was taped to the cab post at eye level, the tape gone brown and brittle. A scale ticket from the co-op, a little slip no bigger than a recipe card, so faded I had to lean close. Wayne Brandt. June 22, 1994. Hard red winter wheat. Test weight 61. The first load he ever cut with that machine.
And under it, on the bare metal of the post, in carpenter’s pencil, in my father’s square printing:
K. first round alone. 6-21-99. Didn’t miss a head.
I had never seen it. I had sat eighteen inches from it for three summers, looking at the wheat the way he taught me, and never once turned my head.
I cried in that cab for a while. Then I wiped my face on my sleeve, climbed down, and went in and ate my mother’s roast, and over the green beans I said, “Does the old combine still belong to you?”
“It does.”
“I’d like to use it next summer.”
Mom passed me the rolls. “The key’s on the nail by the cellar door,” she said. “It has been since 2014.”
I am an office manager. I do the things in order.
The first thing was the crop itself. I was not going to cut wheat that another person had paid to put in the ground. That would have made me exactly what my brother said I was.
So the last week of September, before he drilled, I drove to the co-op on my lunch hour and asked Jim at the counter what the seed wheat and the fertilizer would run for the Brandt home quarter. He figured it. I wrote a check for half, in my own name, out of my own savings: $5,960. It was most of what I had put by for a newer car.
Jim looked at the check a good while.
“Russ know about this?”
“He will when he gets his statement.”
“Well,” Jim said, and stamped it.
Russ drilled the whole quarter the second week of October, like he always did. When I saw the green coming up in rows on my way to Sunday dinner, I looked up the custom rate for drilling, multiplied it by eighty acres, and mailed him a check for $1,440 with a note that said only, For drilling the north eighty. Thank you. K.
He never said a word about the co-op. He never cashed the check either. I watched my bank statement all winter and it never cleared.
The second thing was the machine.
I knew how to drive that combine. I did not know how to bring one back from eleven years in a shed. I stood in front of it the first Sunday in November with a flashlight and a parts book and no idea where to begin.
A pickup door shut behind me. Ordell.
He walked up beside me and looked at the combine for about a minute, working a toothpick.