The Harvest Her Neighbors Brought In

The men didn’t cheer, exactly. They’re not a cheering sort of crowd. But there was a kind of settling that went through the yard, shoulders coming down, somebody laughing too loud at nothing much, Wade Lund throwing his cap straight up in the air and not bothering to catch it. Pastor Ferris stood at the edge of the drive and said a short prayer right there with his boots still muddy, thanking God for dry weather and for neighbors and, he said, for a man like Walt Tarski who had spent his whole life planting things he would not always be the one to harvest.

I thought that was the end of it, or close enough to the end that I could let my knees finally give out a little, standing there in the yard with the last grain truck pulling out for the elevator and rain starting to tap the brim of my hat.

Hobie found me there by the gate, and I noticed he had something in his hands, an old cigar box, the cardboard kind with a hinged lid, soft and dark at the corners from age.

“This isn’t mine to keep anymore,” he said. “It’s past time you had it.”

I asked him what in the world he was carrying around a cigar box for in the middle of harvest, and he told me he’d had it in his truck cab for three days because he didn’t know how, or when, to give it to me, and that today seemed like the only day left to do it.

He set it on the hood of his truck and opened the lid himself, because my hands, by then, were not steady enough to manage a hinge.

Inside were slips of paper. Dozens of them. Some were torn off the corner of a feed sack, some were on the back of an old church bulletin, one was written on the cardboard flap of a seed bag. Names, dates, small amounts of money, and on nearly every single one, in Walt’s own square handwriting, the same two words written across the bottom corner: paid, forget it.

I did not understand what I was looking at, not at first. Hobie had to walk me through it, slip by slip, standing right there at the hood of his truck while the rain came on steadier around us and nobody made any move to get out of it.