The Last Harvest in the Combine Cab

What Arlene said

My wife Arlene is a quiet woman. She worked in the school kitchen at the elementary for thirty-one years and in all that time I do not think she raised her voice above the clatter of a dish tray. But she sees things.

One night that week I came in from the shop at ten with corn dust in my collar and found her at the table with a cup of decaf and her reading glasses pushed up on her head.

She took her glasses off and folded them. “Gust,” she said. “Don’t you ask him.”

“I’m not going to.”

“I know you’re not. I’m only saying it so you hear it out loud.”

She rinsed her cup and went to bed. I sat at the table a good while after that. The refrigerator hummed. I could hear Sadie’s toenails on the linoleum, and then I could not.

The spilled corn

One evening he swung the unloading auger late and a fan of shelled corn went over the edge of the cart into the stubble. He stopped the machine at the end of the row and climbed down and picked up that corn by hand, a coffee can of it, and carried it back and poured it in the cart. Craig watched this from the tractor seat and rubbed his jaw. I had never once told Tyler to do it. A few bushels fell on every field in the fall of my life and I never stopped for one handful.

I still said nothing. I told myself he was being careful, and that careful is a decent trait in a grandson.

The creek corner

The last field was the Home Eighty. Seventy acres of corn between the house and the road, the ground I was born on, and I had saved it for the end on purpose. We started it the Wednesday before the last Saturday of October.

On the east side, along the creek, there is a low corner that has drowned out most years of my life. This year the June rains had stood in it for a week. The corn there came up short and yellow, and when we cut it the yield number on the monitor fell by half.

Tyler watched it fall. “Wet corner,” he said.

“It’s always been wet. In the field book it says so every year.”

“Could you fix it?”

“You’d tile it. Run perforated pipe under the field to pull the water off the low spot out to the creek. My father wanted to do it in 1971 and couldn’t afford it, and I wanted to in 1990 and couldn’t afford it.”

“Could you afford it now?”

“I’m selling the farm.”

“Oh,” Tyler said. “Right.”

He turned back to the windshield. I turned back too. Sadie sighed on the footrest.

I did not think anything of the question. I thought of it later, though. I thought of it a lot.