The Harvest the Town Boy Brought In

The fall

That first Saturday in October, after he told me cords and not combines, Gordon went up the ladder on his biggest grain bin to check the level of last year’s corn.

He’d done it a thousand times. He was sixty-six, strong as a fence post, and stubborn about railings.

The top rung was wet from the morning. His boot slipped. He fell about ten feet onto the concrete pad.

I was the one who heard it. I was fifty yards away hooking up the auger. I heard a sound like a sack of feed hitting the ground, and then nothing, and then Sue screaming his name from the porch.

I got to him first. He was on his side, gray in the face, trying to sit up. “Don’t move, Gordon,” I said. “Lay still. I mean it.”

“I’m fine,” he said. Then he tried to move his leg and went white and didn’t say anything else.

Sue called 911. The ambulance came out from Benson in about twenty minutes, which out on that road is quick. Owen stood on the porch holding Lily’s hand and didn’t cry until the ambulance doors closed.

They took him to the hospital in Willmar. By that night we knew it was a broken hip. They did surgery the next morning and put in a rod and screws.

The surgeon was a young woman with a ponytail who talked to Gordon like he was a reasonable person, which I appreciated, because he wasn’t being one.

“Three or four days here,” she told us. “Then rehab. Two weeks in transitional care if he works hard. Longer if he fights us.”

Gordon looked at the ceiling. “I have six hundred and forty acres standing,” he said.

“Not this month you don’t,” she said.