The Harvest the Neighbors Brought In
“He did not tell you,” Nathan said.
“He said he was helping a little.”
“It was a hundred and sixty acres,” Nathan said. “My dad had not got one row in. The bank note was due. My mom was at the hospital every day with my two sisters, and I was fourteen years old, and I had been trying to run the combine myself. I’d got it stuck in the low ground behind the barn, and I was out there at dark with a shovel, because I did not know what else to do.”
He wiped his face with the back of his glove and left a smear of dust.
“Your husband showed up Sunday afternoon after church, in his good pants. Pulled in with his combine behind the pickup. He did not knock on the door. He did not call. He walked straight out to where I was and looked at the stuck combine and looked at me, and he said, ‘Well, let’s get her out, son.’ And we did, with a chain. Then he went and got his own machine going in our corn. I mean in our corn, Mrs. Hostetler. Four days. He ran till ten, eleven at night with the lights on. Slept in his truck behind the shop one night because he said it wasn’t worth the drive.”
“He came home,” I said. “He came home every night.”
“Not the Wednesday, did he?”
I thought. I had held supper until nine that Wednesday, and he came in and said the dryer was acting up, and I had believed him because I always believed him.
“He told me the dryer,” I said.
“Yes, ma’am. The dryer.”
I put my hand against the combine’s tire. It came up to my shoulder. It was warm.
Nathan told me the rest of it standing there in the dust.
When the corn was in, Gordon hauled the last load to the elevator himself and had them put it all in Dexter’s account. Then he took the ticket back, wrote on it, and stopped by the Weiss kitchen that night, when Nathan’s mother, Lorna, was home for the first time in four days. He put the ticket on her table and said she should buy the boy some boots. Lorna said, “Gordon, we cannot pay you back.”
And Gordon said, “Nobody’s asking you to.”
“My dad never farmed again after that stroke,” Nathan said. “He lived seven more years, most of it in a chair by the window, and Gordon came every Saturday for two hours and read him the farm report out loud. Did you know that?”
I had not known that. I had thought he went to the co-op on Saturdays.
“When Dad passed, I had never run the place on my own. Your husband walked me through the whole year. He lent me his planter two springs in a row and wouldn’t take a nickel. When I tried to pay him, he said, ‘Wait till somebody needs it.’ That’s all he ever said about it.”