The Shop Door Opened at Seven

The Header

I do not know what I expected. I think I expected to feel Rick there, or to cry, or something.

What I felt was busy.

Luke had Arlo unhook the cart inside the shop, and the two of them chained the header so it could not roll.

Luke went to work with the angle grinder, and the shop filled up with that high scream and the smell of hot steel. I ran for things. I found the quarter inch plate on the rack. I held the tape. I marked where he told me to mark.

Arlo sat on the overturned bucket in the corner. Nobody told him not to. Luke had set it upright, and Arlo did not know whose it had been.

I did not say anything about it. I think Rick would have liked a neighbor sitting there, on a harvest morning, keeping him company while the work got done.

Luke ground the crack out to bright metal and found the end of it, a little farther than you could see from outside. He drilled a small hole at the very tip so it would stop running. Then he beveled both sides and fit everything up tight.

When he flipped his helmet down and struck the arc, I had to turn around. It was the same sound. The same steady crackle, like bacon in a pan, that I had heard through the kitchen window for twenty two years.

I went and stood by the door and looked at the stubble for a minute. When I came back in, Arlo was standing up, watching over Luke’s shoulder with his hand up to shade his eyes.

“That’s a nice bead,” Arlo said, to nobody in particular.

Luke ran the root and two fill passes and let it cool. He cut the two gussets on the bandsaw, ground the edges, and welded them in on both sides of the tube, all the way around. He chipped the slag and wire brushed everything and sprayed it with green primer from a can.

At eleven forty he flipped his helmet up and said, “That should do it.”

Arlo walked all the way around that header twice. He got down on one knee and looked at the gussets from underneath. He knocked on the tube with his knuckles like he was checking a melon.

“Better than new,” he said.

The Ticket

I sat down at the metal desk and opened Rick’s book to the next clean page. I wrote the date at the top in my own handwriting, right under Rick’s last entry.

Arlo Jensen. 630F header. Main tube repaired, stop hole drilled, two gussets. Labor 4 hours 30 minutes at $60. Material $34. Total $304.

I tore the yellow copy out and handed it to him.

Arlo looked at it a long time, his reading glasses pushed down his nose.

“Sixty,” he said.

“That’s what Rick charged you.”

“Dale would have been ninety five.”

“I know what Dale charges, Arlo.”

He took out his checkbook and leaned on the bench to write it. When he handed it to me, he did not let go of it right away.

“I’m sorry, Shelly,” he said. “I sat at that table and let Dale say what he said, and I didn’t say a word. I’ve known you twenty five years.”

“You came out here,” I said. “That’s saying something.”

He nodded and let go of the check.

Then he hooked up his header and pulled out of our drive at noon, and by one o’clock I could see his combine moving through his beans a mile and a half south of us, a little gold cloud of dust behind it.

Luke stood in the door and watched it the whole way, his helmet hanging from one hand, until the combine was just a speck in the dust.