The Harvest the Town Boy Brought In

“Town boys run cords, not combines.”

Gordon said it with his hand flat on the ladder of the combine, the way a man rests his hand on a horse he doesn’t want you touching.

It was the first Saturday of October. The machine shed smelled like grease and dust and the cold coffee in his thermos. My son Owen was standing right beside me, eight years old, holding a grease gun he had begged to carry.

I had asked the same question I asked every fall. Could I take a few rounds on the bean field this year, just the easy end by the road, while he ran the grain cart?

Eleven harvests I had asked. Eleven harvests I got the same answer, almost word for word, like he kept it folded in his shirt pocket.

“You’ve got the truck,” Gordon said. “The truck matters. Somebody has to get it to town.”

“I know the truck matters,” I said.

“Then drive it.” He climbed two rungs and turned around. “Cords and wire, Tyler. That’s your trade, and you’re good at it. This is mine.”

Owen looked up at me. He didn’t say anything. He just watched my face to see what a man does when somebody says that to him in front of his kid.

I nodded. I said, “All right, Gordon.” And I went to check the tires on the red grain truck, because that was my job.

I am not proud of how many times I said “all right” to that man. But I want to tell this straight, so I’ll say it plain. I said it a lot.

The town boy

My name is Tyler Brekke. I was thirty-five that fall. I grew up in town, in a little rambler two blocks from the Lutheran church, where the biggest piece of equipment we owned was a riding mower.

My dad drove for the county highway department. My mom cut hair in our basement. I learned to wire a three-way switch when I was fourteen and I’ve been an electrician ever since, the last ten years for a contractor in Benson named Jeff.

I met Amanda Lindahl at a wedding dance in the fire hall. She had hay in the cuff of her jeans and she beat me at arm wrestling in front of my cousins. I married her two years later.

Amanda grew up on her dad’s 640 acres west of town. Corn and soybeans, rotated half and half, the same ground her grandfather broke. The farm sits on a gravel road with a row of cottonwoods along the drive and a mailbox Gordon welded himself out of a disc blade.

From the first harvest after our wedding, I showed up. Every October. Nobody asked me to. It just seemed like what you do when you marry into a farm. You show up with gloves.

Gordon put me in the grain truck that first year. He showed me how to back up to the auger, how to tarp a load, how to sit in the line at the elevator in Benson without losing my temper or my place.

That was fine. I liked the truck. I liked the elevator line, the old guys leaning on their fenders talking about moisture and the price at the river.

But I wanted the combine. I’m not going to pretend I didn’t. Every year I watched that green machine eat a field in long patient passes and I wanted to know what it felt like to sit up there.

So every year I asked. And every year Gordon said some version of the same thing. Town boys run cords, not combines.