The Harvest the Town Boy Brought In

Coming home

Gordon came home the next afternoon, a Saturday. Two weeks and two days after he fell, on a walker for short distances and a wheelchair for anything longer than the kitchen.

Sue brought him from Willmar in the car. She called Amanda when they hit the county road.

That morning Arnie and I had pulled the combine out of the shed and parked it at the end of the driveway, by the mailbox. Corn head off, washed down, the glass cleaned. Beside it we parked the red grain truck, the very last load from the home quarter, tarp rolled back so you could see the yellow corn heaped up to the top of the sides.

I hadn’t hauled it to the bin. I left it. Amanda asked me why, and I said, “I want him to see the last of it.” She didn’t ask again.

It was one of those October afternoons you get maybe five of a year in Minnesota. No wind. Gold light. The cornfields stripped down to stubble behind the truck, and the cottonwoods along the drive about half bare.

Amanda stood by the mailbox with Lily on her hip, then set her down when Lily got squirmy. Owen had run up and down the drive about forty times.

When Sue’s car came up the road, Owen yelled, “Grandpa!” loud enough to scare the cattle three miles off, if there had been any.

Sue pulled into the end of the drive and stopped. I got the wheelchair out of the trunk, and Amanda and I helped Gordon from the car into the chair. He was thinner. His face was a little gray still. He had a blanket Sue had put over his knees.

He didn’t say anything. He looked at the combine. Then he looked at the grain truck. Then he looked past both of them, at the home quarter, and the stubble running all the way back to the shelterbelt.

I took the handles of the wheelchair and pushed him slowly over the gravel toward the truck. Nobody talked. You could hear the gravel crunching under the wheels and a pheasant somewhere out in the ditch.

When we got to the truck I stopped. Gordon reached up and put his hand on the steel side of the box, and then he reached over the top and dug his fingers into the corn.

He held a handful up and looked at it. Bright, hard, dry kernels.

“Fifteen?” he said.

“Fifteen and a half off the dryer,” I said. “Fourteen and change in the bin.”

He let the corn fall back through his fingers.