The Shop Door Opened at Seven

Monday Morning

Luke was up before me. I heard the compressor kick on at quarter to six.

When I came out with two cups of coffee, he had the big Miller on the cart checked over, a fresh spool of .035 wire in the feeder, the argon bottle full, and the gauge on the oxy-acetylene set reading right. He had swept the floor again even though I had already done it.

“You nervous?” I asked.

“No,” he said, which meant yes.

At seven o’clock exactly, I pulled the chain and rolled the big overhead door up.

The sun was just coming over the shelterbelt, low and gold, lighting up the bean stubble across the road. Our pickup and the empty flatbed were sitting in the gravel where Rick always parked them. The air smelled like dust and diesel and frost burning off.

I stood in the door in Rick’s apron with his order book in my hand. Luke stood one step behind me in his coveralls, holding his helmet.

Nobody came. At seven twenty, still nobody.

We could hear combines running somewhere to the east. Every few minutes a grain truck went by on the county road toward the elevator in Webster, and every time, I held my breath, and every time, it kept going.

“Maybe nobody comes,” Luke said.

“Then we open again tomorrow,” I said. “And the day after that.”

He did not say anything. But he set his helmet down on the bench, and I took that to mean he was staying.

At seven forty we heard a diesel on the section road.

A white Ford came over the rise slow, pulling a header cart. On the cart was a thirty foot John Deere flex head, the green paint sun faded, and even from the house I could see the crack. It ran clean through the main frame tube on the left side of the feeder opening.

Arlo Jensen. He turned into our drive and stopped short, at the end of the gravel, with the engine still running.

He did not back in. He just sat there. I watched him look at the apron on me. I watched him look at Luke. Then I watched him look up, over our heads, at the old sign above the door. It was a sheet of steel Rick had cut out with a torch when we were first married. Brandvold Welding, in letters he had painted himself.

Arlo leaned out the window with his seed cap in his hand.

“Shelly,” he said, “before I back this header in, I need to ask Luke one thing.”

“Go ahead,” I said.

Arlo looked at Luke. He was not being unkind. He was a man with four hundred acres of beans standing in the field and one header to cut them with.

“Dale says you never did structural on your own,” Arlo said. “Says your dad always finished the important stuff. Is that so?”

Luke did not look at me. He walked out into the gravel, right up to the header cart, and crouched down by the crack. He ran his thumb along it. He looked at the underside of the tube. He stood back up.

“Dad wrote this job down in August,” Luke said. “He was going to grind the crack out, V it, run a root and two fill passes, and put a quarter inch gusset on both sides so it doesn’t crack again in the same spot. I’d do it the same way.

“I’ve done six of these with him. The last two he just watched.”

Arlo was quiet.

“If you want to take it to Uncle Dale, that’s all right,” Luke said. “He does good work. But he’s a week out, and you’ll lose a week of beans.”

Arlo looked at me one more time. Then he put his cap back on.

“Well,” he said. “Guess I’d better back this thing in.”