The Half of the Wheat I Cut Myself
“It’s wheat!” I yelled back, and for some reason we both laughed until I had to wipe my eyes.
The 1460 holds about a hundred and eighty bushels, so every round and a half I swung the auger out over Mom’s truck and unloaded. A truckload was about three hundred. Then she would roll up the tarp, grind it into gear, and head for the elevator eight miles off while I cut on, and I would watch the dust of her going and think: that is my mother, and I have never one time in my life seen her not show up.
When she came back from the first load she handed a slip of paper up to me.
A scale ticket. Hard red winter wheat. Test weight 61. And on the top line, typed, where it had only ever said Wayne Brandt or Russ Brandt: Kelly Brandt.
“I told them at the scale house how to write it,” Mom said. “Half of this quarter goes in your name. I own the land, I expect I can say so.”
That was the second speech she made that year.
I put the ticket in my back pocket and buttoned the pocket.
By midafternoon the thermometer on Mom’s porch said a hundred and two. Chaff stuck to the sweat on my arms and neck until I itched like I had rolled in fiberglass. Maddie drank a gallon of water and never once asked to go to the house.
And the pickups started going by.
That section road sees six or eight vehicles a day. That afternoon I counted fourteen, and every one of them slowed down. By supper everybody for ten miles knew that Wayne Brandt’s old red combine was running in the home quarter and that his girl from the dentist’s office was in the seat with a twelve-year-old on the toolbox and Jean hauling.
Nobody honked. A man would sit there with his elbow out the window and watch a round, then lift a finger off the wheel and drive on.
Russ went by twice in his service truck. He did not slow down either time. But I saw his head turn.
We quit at nine that night with twenty-six acres cut. I could not close my hands all the way.
The second day the belt broke.
It was about eleven in the morning. I was halfway down the field when there was a bang like a rifle shot under the left side, and the header just quit. The reel stopped turning, the sickle stopped, and I was pushing a twenty-foot wall of standing wheat with a dead front end. I shut everything down the way Ordell had drilled me, climbed off, and found the feeder drive belt lying in the stubble behind me in two pieces, still smoking.
I stood there with half of it in each hand. The parts store was thirty-five minutes each way, if they had one for a forty-year-old International, which they would not. Ordell was on Russ’s grain cart two miles east and it was not Sunday.
That was the moment I thought, he was right. I had on a T-shirt with a tooth on it. I had no business out there.
Maddie came down the ladder and looked at the belt.
“Can you fix it?”
“I can put a new one on. I don’t have a new one.”