The Harvest Her Neighbors Brought In

I did not have $19,000 sitting loose. The funeral alone had run just over $9,000, the vault and the stone deposit and the dinner, and the life insurance agent had already told me, gently, that it could be six weeks before a claim like Walt’s cleared, longer if anything needed a second look, which it might, because he’d died at home instead of a hospital. Six weeks. The beans were not going to hold six days, let alone six weeks, not with rain coming and the pods already rattling dry in the wind.

I thought about calling my brother in Bismarck, but he sells insurance, not grain, and has not driven anything bigger than a riding mower since 1994. I thought about calling the bank, and I did, and the man there was kind too, and told me they could maybe get me an operating loan against the standing crop in ten days to two weeks, which would have been a fine answer in July and was a useless answer in October.

I even thought, for one bad hour on Tuesday night, about calling an elevator manager I knew over in Jamestown and asking if he’d just buy the crop standing, let some other outfit worry about cutting it, take whatever discount he wanted to name for the trouble. I got as far as finding his number in Walt’s address book, the one with the broken spine that lived on the shelf by the phone for twenty some years, before I put the receiver back down. It felt like giving away something that was not only mine to give, and I did not have the strength that night to make a decision that size alone.

My daughter in law called from Williston that same night, Dean’s wife Shelly, soft voiced and apologizing before she’d even said what she was calling about, which was that Dean’s crew foreman was being hard about letting him off his rotation on short notice, and could she do anything from her end to help, drive out herself even, though she had never run anything bigger than a lawn tractor either. I told her I had already called Jamestown. I did not tell her the number. I did not want it to be the last thing she thought about me, a widow four days gone who could not even say the number out loud without her voice breaking.

So on Wednesday afternoon I sat down with that legal pad and I did the only thing that felt like doing something. I started listing the fields in order of which ones I was willing to lose.