The Last Harvest in the Combine Cab

The last round

On the last Saturday of October we came to the end of the Home Eighty. By two in the afternoon there were fifteen acres left standing in the middle, a square with stubble all around it.

I had planned to run the last rounds myself. When I got to the ladder Tyler was already in the operator’s seat with his hands on the wheel, and he looked at me with his chin out a little, like he was braced to be told no.

I took the buddy seat.

“Go ahead,” I said.

We cut corn for three hours. The field narrowed the way a field does, round by round, a smaller and smaller square of standing corn with the stubble spreading out around it. Craig sat at the end of the field with the grain cart and waited for us to come to him. The geese went over twice. I watched the ground, and I watched my grandson’s hands, steady on the wheel, and I watched the square of corn go from fifteen acres to ten to five.

Around five o’clock the last stretch was two hundred feet across. I had imagined this in June, sitting on a bucket at the end of a corn row. I had expected something to move in my chest like a lock turning.

Nothing did. It was a field of corn. The corn rolled up the feeder house, the machine rocked and hummed, and the only thing different was the boy at the wheel, who kept his eyes on a fencepost at the far end of the row, which is where I told him in September to look.

The last round took four minutes.

He ran the head through the final strip and kept going out the far side, and the last stalks fell inside the platform, and he lifted the head and the machine came free of the standing corn and rolled out onto the stubble.

He throttled down to idle and set the brake. The cab went quiet. In the quiet I could hear the geese again, a long way off.

“That’s it,” I said.

Tyler didn’t answer. He sat looking at the glass. Then he reached up above the dash to the little shelf where I keep my field book.