The Half of the Wheat I Cut Myself
“Did he call anybody?” I asked.
“Every custom cutter in three counties is covered up. Don Schmidt’s boy is cutting his own.” Mom looked straight ahead through the windshield. “He won’t ask you, Kelly. You know that.”
“I know it.”
“I’m not asking you either.”
“I know that too, Mom.”
She put the truck in gear and pulled down to the end of the field to wait.
I went back to cutting. I had my own wheat to get. Every time I turned at the south end I could see Russ. He had the shields off and was lying on his back under the feeder house getting the wreck torn down so it would be ready when the parts came, because that is who he is. He will work on a hopeless thing until dark rather than stand and look at it.
He has been that way since he was thirty-five years old and we buried our father and I drove back to town on Monday.
At twenty minutes to six I made my last pass. The final strip of my eighty went under the reel, and there was the orange flag on Ordell’s steel post, and beyond it thirty-four acres of the prettiest wheat on the place, standing dead still under a sky going the color of a bruise in the west.
I stopped at the post and unloaded into Mom’s truck. My half was cut, every bushel of it under my own name. I could have driven that machine to the shed, shut the door, and been right. Nobody on this earth could have said a word to me.
Russ had come out from under his machine. He was standing beside it about two hundred yards off with a wrench hanging from his hand. His cap was off. He was not looking at the sky. He was looking at me.
I thought about $18,300. I will not lie to you and say I did not.
Then I looked at the pencil writing on the cab post. Didn’t miss a head.
“Mom,” Maddie said. “Are we done?”
“No, ma’am,” I said.
I turned the wheel south, dropped the header, and drove past the flag into my brother’s wheat.
I did not stop to discuss it with him. I started at the north edge of his thirty-four acres and cut, the same as I had cut my own, a hand off the ground and watching the heads.
At the end of the first round his semi was sitting there in place of Mom’s truck. Russ was up on the side of the trailer. I swung the auger out and unloaded a hundred and eighty bushels into it. He looked at the grain coming out and not at me.
When the auger ran empty he called up, over the engine, “You don’t have to do this.”
“I know it,” I called back, and swung the auger in.
That was all that was said in that field for five hours.
Mom took Maddie to the house at dark and fed her, and then the two of them came back and sat in the grain truck at the end of the field, because neither one would go to bed. Ordell got back with the parts at twenty to nine. He looked at the old red combine going up and down Russ’s wheat with every light on it burning, and he looked at Russ, and he set the box of parts on the ground and went and got in Mom’s truck to haul, since the semi was full.