The Harvest the Town Boy Brought In

What Amanda said

“He doesn’t mean it the way it sounds,” Amanda told me, the first few years.

Then later, around year six, she stopped saying that. She’d just squeeze my hand under the supper table when he said it, and look at her plate.

Her mother, Sue, was kinder about it out loud. Sue would bring me a second piece of bars in the truck and say, “You keep that elevator line moving, honey. He notices.”

He didn’t notice. Or if he did, he never said so.

Amanda has an older brother, Curt. Curt grew up on that farm. He could run every piece of equipment on the place by the time he was fifteen. Then he went to college in Fargo, took a job doing software for a bank in Minneapolis, and never came back except for Christmas.

Gordon never talked about it. Not once in eleven years did I hear him say a bad word about Curt. But whenever Curt’s name came up at the table, Gordon got up and went to look at the weather on the porch.

I didn’t put those two things together for a long time. I’m a slow study about people. Wire, I can read. People take me a while.

Arnie

Our nearest neighbor is Arnie, who was seventy-two that fall. Arnie farmed the section north of Gordon for forty years, then rented his ground out to a young couple when his knees went.

Arnie still kept his old combine in his shed, an older green machine with a six-row head. He said he couldn’t sell it any more than he could sell his dog.

Four years before the fall I’m telling you about, Arnie caught me at the elevator in the truck, waiting on a probe. He leaned on my door and said, “You ever run one?”

I said no.

“You want to?”

I said yes so fast he laughed.

That year the young couple renting his ground were short a combine for a few days, and Arnie told them he’d knock out their last eighty acres of beans himself if they’d let a town boy ride along and learn.

He put me in the seat on the second day. He sat in the buddy seat beside me with his cap pushed back and talked the whole time.

“Header height, that’s your whole life in beans,” he said. “You get it too high, you leave pods on the stubble. Too low, you’re eating dirt and rocks. Feel it. Listen to it.”

I listened. I learned the sound of a machine that’s happy and the sound of one that’s about to plug. I learned to watch the grain tank fill and the loss monitor flicker.

The next three falls, Arnie found reasons to need me. A few rounds here, an afternoon there. I never told Gordon. I’m not sure why. I think I didn’t want to hear him tell me it didn’t count.

In the winters I read manuals. I’m an electrician. I read manuals for fun the way some men read westerns. I got the operator’s manual for Gordon’s combine off the dealer’s website and printed all four hundred pages at the shop.

Amanda found the binder in the basement one night in February. She paged through it, saw my pencil marks in the margins, and didn’t say a word. She just set it back on the shelf a little straighter than I’d left it.