The Harvest Her Neighbors Brought In

The home quarter first, I decided it had to be saved no matter what, because Walt’s father broke that ground and because it was closest to the yard and might, might, be something I could beg somebody to help me cut in a single long day. The back forty along the coulee, that one I crossed off first, because it flooded easiest and the beans there were already starting to shatter in the wind, every pod dropping its seed on the ground instead of into a hopper.

I remember looking at that word, shatter, written in my own handwriting, and thinking that it was the first time in four days I had cried about anything besides Walt, and I was crying about dirt.

That is when I heard the engine.

At first I told myself it was just somebody out on the township road, a grain truck running to the elevator, nothing to do with me. Then I heard a second one behind it, and a third, and I set the pencil down and went to the window, and what I saw through that glass is a thing I will carry to my own grave.

It was Hobie Lund’s green combine, coming up our approach with its header folded for road travel, and behind it was his boy Wade driving the grain cart tractor, and behind that was a pickup I recognized as Dale Severson’s, and behind that another, and another, until I lost count somewhere past eight and had to go stand on the porch in my stocking feet to see the rest of the line.

Hobie climbed down out of that cab before it had even finished rolling to a stop in our yard, moving careful the way a man moves when his knees have put in forty some years of combine steps.

“Morning, Nell,” he said, like it was any morning at all.

“Hobie, what in the world,” I said, and that was as far as I got.

“We talked about it at the fire hall Monday night,” he said. “Whole department. Decided we weren’t going to stand around while Walt Tarski’s beans went down in the mud. Figured you’d fight us on it, so we just came instead of calling first.”

I told him I could not pay for this, that I had already called Jamestown and knew what it cost, and he looked at me the way you look at somebody who has said something a little bit foolish without meaning to.

“Nobody is talking about paying anybody anything,” he said. “Now where do you want the first header dropped, home quarter or the section by the highway?”

I did not have an answer ready, because I had spent four days preparing myself to lose something and not one minute preparing myself for this.