The Harvest the Neighbors Brought In
I called Quinn Fehr from the hospital parking garage, because that was where I had signal.
Quinn runs custom harvesting out of Seward. He has two big combines and a good crew, and he is honest. He was kind. He was sorry to hear about Gordon. He said, “Arlene, I am booked through the twenty-ninth, and I mean booked, I have got men sleeping in my shop.”
“The twenty-ninth,” I said. That was three weeks away.
“I could maybe squeeze you in the twentieth if somebody cancels. It would be forty-five an acre, hauling extra.”
I stood on the concrete with a pencil and the back of a parking stub. Forty-five times two hundred forty is ten thousand eight hundred dollars. It was money we would not see until the grain was sold, and the grain could not be sold until it was in.
“Thank you, Quinn,” I said. “I’ll call you back.”
I did not call him back. There was nothing to say.
I also did not call the neighbors, and I want to be honest about why. It was not pride, exactly. Well, it was a little pride, but it was Gordon’s, and I had carried it so long I wore it without noticing. The thing about harvest in this country is that every farm is running its own combine that week. Every man is behind and every man is tired. You do not call a neighbor in October and ask him to leave his own crop standing so he can come save yours. Gordon would have gone without his own supper before he did that to another man. He had told me so, more than once, in the plainest language. Never ask anybody in harvest, Arlene. They’ll come if they can.
So I did not ask.
Gordon came out of surgery a little before nine that night. The surgeon found me in the waiting room and said it had gone as well as it could go. I was allowed ten minutes in the recovery unit, and Gordon was a color I had never seen on him, and he had tubes in places I will not describe, and he did not wake.
I sat beside him until a nurse named Vonda brought me a blanket and said, kindly, “Honey, there is a family lounge with a recliner.”
I did not sleep in the recliner. I went down to the chapel instead.
It is a small room on the first floor, with six pews and a window of colored glass lit from behind so it looks like daytime even at night. It was a little after four in the morning. I sat in the front pew and put my hands in my lap.
I am not a woman who bargains with the Lord. I was raised that you thank Him, and you ask Him for strength, and you do not tell Him how to run His business. But I was so tired. And I was scared, down in a place under the tired. So I did bargain, a little.
I said, “I am not asking for much.”