The Harvest the Town Boy Brought In

The hospital in between

We visited Gordon every evening the first week, in shifts. They had moved him from the hospital to the transitional care place on the other side of Willmar, a long low brick building with a bird feeder outside every window.

Sue went every day. Amanda went most nights after unloading. I went twice that first week, both times late, both times smelling like bean dust.

The first time I went, Gordon was sitting up in a recliner with a walker parked beside him. A physical therapist named Kim was trying to get him to stand.

He saw me in the doorway and his face didn’t change.

“Beans are done on the road field and the north eighty,” I said. “Twelve point eight moisture at the elevator. Running about fifty-five.”

He nodded once. He didn’t ask anything. He just nodded and looked at Kim and said, “Let’s go, then,” and stood up on the walker with his jaw clenched so hard I could see the muscle.

Out in the hall, Sue caught my arm.

“He asks,” she said quietly. “Every night. When you’re not here. What field, what moisture, how many loads. He has me write it down.”

“Then why won’t he ask me?”

Sue looked at me with something tired and sad in her face.

“Because then he’d have to say it,” she said. “And he doesn’t know how yet.”

Corn

Corn is a different animal. The plants stand eight feet tall, and the corn head on Gordon’s combine is eight rows wide, snapping the ears off and feeding them into the machine while the stalks get chopped and spread.

The corn came in wet the first two days, twenty-one, twenty-two percent moisture. That’s why Gordon has the dryer. You bring it down to fifteen before it goes in the bin, or it spoils.

I’d never run the dryer. But it’s a burner and a fan and a control panel, and I’ve spent my whole life on control panels.

I went over every wire in that box the first night with a flashlight in my teeth. The next morning I had it running steady at fifteen and a half coming out, and Sue, who had watched Gordon run it for thirty years, came and stood beside me and said, “He’d have been out here three times in the night fussing at it.”

“I came out twice,” I said.

She laughed. It was good to hear her laugh.

We ran corn every day that week from about eleven in the morning, when the dew was off, until one or two at night. The combine has lights all the way around it like a little city. You can see every row.

Running at night is a strange, peaceful thing. The whole world shrinks down to the eight rows in front of you and the lights of the cart coming alongside. You can see the yard light at Arnie’s, and the yard light at Gordon’s, and the red light on the radio tower twenty miles off, and that’s it.

Some nights Amanda rode a round with me in the buddy seat before she went in to the kids. She didn’t talk much. She’d just sit there and watch the corn come in.

One night she put her hand on my knee and said, “You know he’d never have let you.”

“I know.”

“You’re doing it anyway.”

“Somebody has to,” I said. “Your dad’s corn doesn’t know who’s driving.”