The Half of the Wheat I Cut Myself
I cut by headlight. The wheat came up out of the dark silver-white and fell under the reel. There was lightning in the west by nine thirty, with no sound to it yet. The wind stayed warm out of the south, which was a mercy, because it kept the straw dry enough to thresh.
I sang every hymn I knew to stay awake, and then every song off the radio from 1999.
The first thunder I could hear over the engine came at ten forty. I had two rounds left.
I got one of them.
The rain hit when I was a hundred yards into the last one, big hard drops banging on the cab roof, and then the wind swung around to the northwest all at once and the temperature dropped twenty degrees in a minute. I finished the pass with wet straw wrapping the reel and unloaded what I had into Ordell’s truck with the tarp half on, and then the hail started, pea-sized, rattling off the hood, and we all ran for it.
We lost about an acre in the southeast corner. One acre, out of thirty-four.
I drove the combine into the shed in a downpour, shut her off, and sat in the dark listening to the hail on the tin. My hands would not let go of the wheel. I had to tell them to.
It was after midnight when Russ came to Mom’s back door.
I was at the kitchen table in a dry shirt of my mother’s with my hair wet from the shower and a plate of cold roast I was too tired to eat. Maddie was asleep on the couch in the front room. Mom was at the stove heating coffee as if it were seven in the morning.
He knocked. I do not believe my brother had ever knocked on that door in his life.
“It’s open,” Mom said, without turning around.
He came in soaked to the skin, mud to the knees, and stood on the mat. He had his checkbook in his hand, the big farm one in the black cover. He looked at the floor, and at the stove, and at the calendar from the co-op on the wall, and he did not look at me.
“Sit down, Russ,” Mom said. “You’re dripping.”
He sat. He opened the checkbook on the oilcloth and wrote. It took him a while because his hands were as bad as mine. Then he tore it out and laid it on the table between the salt and the pepper and pushed it over with two fingers.
Nine thousand one hundred fifty dollars. Half of last year, to the penny.
He reached in his shirt pocket and laid something on top of it. It was my check. The $1,440 for the drilling, from October, gone soft from being carried.
“I couldn’t cash that,” he said. “I couldn’t tear it up, either. I’ve had it in the truck visor since fall.”
Nobody said anything. The coffee started to tick in the pot.
“I’ve been out here every day since Dad died,” he said, to the oilcloth. “Every day. Mom’s furnace at two in the morning. The cows out on the road. That quarter, I’ve put eleven crops in it. And somewhere in there I quit thinking of it as ours and started thinking of it as what I had coming. I told myself you’d left. That made it easy.”