The Harvest Her Neighbors Brought In

By eight that morning there were fourteen pickups along our fence line and I had lost count of the combines somewhere around six. Pastor Ferris showed up at quarter past eight with a two gallon thermos of coffee and his good boots already caked with mud from walking the field edge to see how it was standing. Women from church I had not laid eyes on since the funeral dinner started coming up the drive with casserole dishes and bar pans, setting them on my kitchen counter without asking, the way you only do in a house where there has been a death, filling my refrigerator and then my chest freezer and then, when those were full, the trunk of somebody’s car parked in the shade.

My son Dean called me from Williston a little after seven, already on the road, because somebody’s wife had called somebody’s sister who had called him before I’d even had the chance. He works the oil patch out there, three hundred some miles west, and he drove it in just over four hours with his hazards on half the way, he told me later, like a man running from a fire instead of toward one. He had not sat in a combine cab since he was seventeen years old and mad at his father about a basketball game he wasn’t allowed to go to because of harvest, but by noon he was running a grain cart like he’d never left, hollering at Wade Lund across two fields about who had the fuller load.

I walked the field edges most of that first day because I did not know what else useful I could do with my hands. I carried coffee. I carried sandwiches. I stood at the gate and watched six combines working our home quarter in a line, cutting side by side the way you’d see in a parade, throwing up that fine gold dust that catches the morning light, and more than once I had to turn my face away so nobody would see me standing there just watching my husband’s whole life’s work brought in by other men’s hands.

Pastor Ferris walked the field edge with me a while mid morning, his good boots long past caring about mud by then, and he did not try to fill the quiet with anything useful or comforting, he just walked, and every so often he’d point out something, the way the chaff hung in the air a second longer when the wind died, a hawk working the fence line for whatever the combines were stirring up out of the stubble. Near the end of that walk he told me he had buried eleven farmers in his twenty two years at that church, and every single time, without being asked, the township had shown up to finish whatever work the man had left standing in a field. I asked him why nobody had ever told me that before, and he said some things you do not understand until you are the one standing in the field.