The Name on Our Mailbox

Summer and harvest

I sprayed in June myself. I have held my own private pesticide applicator certification since 2009, because Gary hated the classes and somebody in the house had to keep it current. I keep the card in my wallet behind my driver’s license.

Gary came home on the twenty-second of June. He was thinner. His eyes were clearer than I had seen them in a decade, and he was so careful with everything, with me, with the coffee pot, with the screen door, that it almost broke my heart.

The program had a rule, and Pam had told me about it on the family day: no big decisions for the first year, and nothing that put him back in the old grooves too fast. Intensive outpatient three nights a week in Ames. A meeting every morning. A sponsor named Ron, a retired hog man from two towns over, who called him at six every evening.

“Pam thinks I should stay out of the combine this fall,” Gary said at supper his second week home. “Too much like it was. The long nights. That’s when I’d have one in the cab.”

“Then you’ll stay out of the combine,” I said.

“You’d have to run it.”

“I know who’d have to run it.”

He put his fork down. “I don’t deserve you.”

“Eat your potatoes,” I said, because I did not know what else to say to a man who was trying that hard.

So I ran the combine that fall. We started beans on the twenty-sixth of September and finished corn on the second of November. Tyler ran grain cart on weekends. Dad ran it Monday through Friday, at 80 years old, with a cushion behind his back and his hearing aids turned all the way up so he could hear me on the radio.

Gary ran the dryer and the bins. He did the yard work, the hauling to our own bins, the greasing, the late-night checks on the fans. He was out there every night before bed with a flashlight. He did not miss one meeting.

Steve’s second day came in October. He hauled corn to the elevator in town for one afternoon while our trucker was down with the flu. At the scale house, I found out later, he told the girl at the window his brother’s back was coming along.