The Harvest the Town Boy Brought In

Owen

The second Saturday, Owen asked to ride.

Amanda brought him out at noon with a sack lunch. He climbed the ladder with me right behind him and sat in the buddy seat, his feet not reaching the floor, his eyes huge.

We ran four rounds on the home quarter. He watched the yield monitor the whole time, the number jumping up and down as we went over the good ground and the sandy knob.

“What’s that number, Dad?”

“That’s how many bushels the field is making on this spot,” I said. “Right where we are.”

“Is it good?”

I looked at it. Two hundred and ten. Two hundred and fifteen. Then down to one-ninety over the knob, then back up.

“Yeah, buddy,” I said. “It’s good.”

He was quiet a while. Then he said, “Does Grandpa know you can drive it?”

I didn’t know how to answer that. So I just said, “He knows somebody’s driving it.”

“I’m going to tell him it’s you,” Owen said.

Curt

Curt called me on the Tuesday of the second week. It was the first time in eleven years he had called me on purpose.

“Amanda says you’re doing all of it,” he said.

“Arnie’s doing the cart. The girls are hauling. I’m just driving.”

He was quiet for a second. I could hear an office behind him, phones and a printer.

“I should be up there,” he said.

“You’ve got the twins and a job, Curt. Nobody’s mad at you.”

“Dad is,” he said. “Dad’s been mad at me since 2008.”

I didn’t know what to say to that. It was the first time anybody in that family had said it out loud.

“I’m going to send pizza out to the field,” Curt said finally. “That’s what I’ve got. I’m sending pizza.”

That night a kid in a hatchback drove four pizzas all the way out from Benson and found us in the field by following the combine lights. Arnie ate three pieces standing up on the cart step. He said Curt was all right after all.

The last field

We finished the corn on a Friday night, thirteen days after I started. The last field was the home quarter, the one right behind the house, the one Gordon underlined in his notebook.

I wanted it last. I don’t fully know why. I think I wanted him to be able to see it from the kitchen window when he came home.

I made the last pass at about eleven-forty that night. The tank was full and Arnie was out of cart room, so instead of unloading on the go I swung over and filled the red grain truck that Amanda had parked on the field road.

When the auger ran empty I shut the machine down and sat there in the dark.

Then I took out Gordon’s spiral notebook and the yield monitor’s field summary, and I did what I’d been doing every night for two weeks. I wrote the numbers down in his book, in pencil, underneath his.

“Home quarter, corn,” I wrote. The year. The date. The moisture. Then the yield.

I looked at the number on the screen for a long time.

Two hundred and twelve bushels to the acre.

I wrote it down. I did not underline it. That wasn’t mine to do.