The Last Four Rows He Left

Cutting the field together

I will tell you what nine combines in one field sounds like. It sounds like the ground itself is working.

Dale lined them out. He put me in my father’s green 6600 on the first pass down the south edge, because he said a field ought to be opened by the family, and the rest of them fell in behind and beside me in a staggered line, the way geese fly.

The sun came up while we worked. It came up red through the dust we were throwing, and it lit the chaff cloud over the whole field so it looked like the field was smoking.

I had not run a combine in years. My hands remembered it before my head did. The header dropped, the reel pulled the stalks in, the corn poured gold up the auger and into the tank, and I cried the whole first round and did not care who saw.

My father taught me to drive it on this field when I was fourteen, him on the buddy seat with his hand loose near the wheel, never grabbing it, just there. Keep the row under the third knuckle of the divider, he would say. Do not watch the corn, watch the point. The corn will scare you. The point tells the truth.

I kept the row under the third knuckle that morning. Fifty years old, that machine, and it did not miss an ear. He kept everything the way he kept me, patient and ready and not showing off about it.

Partway down the field the auger plugged, the way it will in heavy corn, and before I could even climb down to clear it one of the younger men was already up on my platform with a broom handle, grinning, hollering over the engine that Virgil would have had it cleared before the machine finished coughing. He was right. My father could fix anything with a broom handle and a cuss word he would not say in front of me.

We worked the field from the outside in, the way you do, leaving the east end for last. The machines passed each other close, and every time one came alongside me the man in it would lift two fingers off the wheel, and I would lift mine, and that was the whole conversation.

By eight in the morning a half section that should have taken me the better part of two days was down to the last of it.

And then Dale, up on the radio my father kept in the old cab, said, hold up. Leave the four.

Nine machines stopped at once. The field went quiet in that sudden way, where your ears keep roaring after the engines cut.

There on the east end, against the tree line, stood the last four rows. Tall and gold and perfect, exactly where my father left them every year of my life, and every year of his.