The Harvest the Town Boy Brought In

Beans

We started Monday at noon, once the dew burned off. You don’t cut beans wet. The pods get tough and the machine fights you.

I’d like to tell you I was smooth from the first round. I was not. On the first pass I set the header too high, and when I looked back the stubble was dotted with pods.

Arnie came up alongside in the cart tractor and got on the radio.

“You’re leaving me lunch out there,” he said. “Drop it an inch. Let it float.”

I dropped it an inch. I let it float. The next pass was clean.

By the middle of that afternoon I had the rhythm. The reel turning, the cutter bar hissing low across the ground, the beans rattling into the tank like gravel in a can. Arnie pulling alongside to take a load on the go without me ever stopping.

Amanda drove the first load of beans to Benson at four o’clock. She called me from the elevator line on the radio.

“Moisture’s twelve point eight,” she said. “Test weight’s good. Nobody’s docking us.”

“Your dad’ll want to know that,” I said.

“I already called Mom,” she said. “Mom’s going to tell him at supper.”

We ran beans till the dew came back, about nine that night. Seventy-some acres the first day. Arnie said that was fine for a first day with a new man. He said it in a way that made me think it was better than fine.

The wire

On the third day of beans, the header started acting up. It would drop on its own, then jerk back up, then drop. I’d lose the float and start scooping dirt.

I stopped the machine, climbed down, and walked out in front of the head. Arnie parked the cart and limped over.

“Hydraulics?” he said.

“I don’t think so,” I said. “It’s acting like it can’t tell where the ground is.”

I got down on my back under the header with a flashlight. It took me ten minutes to find it. A height sensor wire, chewed half through where it ran past the feeder house. Mice. Probably all last winter.

Arnie squinted at it. “Dealer’s an hour out. They’ll want to haul it in.”

“No,” I said. “Hand me my bag out of the truck.”

I spliced it right there in the field with heat shrink and a butt connector and wrapped it in loom so the mice would have to work for it next time. Twenty minutes, start to finish.

When I fired the machine back up and the header settled down onto the ground like it was supposed to, Arnie started laughing so hard he had to hold on to the ladder.

“Cords,” he said. “Town boy fixed the combine with cords.”

I laughed too. It was the first time all week I’d really laughed.

We finished the last of the beans that Thursday at about ten at night, under the work lights. Two hundred ninety acres in four days. Fifty-six bushels an acre across the farm, which Arnie said was a very good bean year for that ground.