The Sundays My Father Never Explained

The grain bin

I pulled a chair over and sat down beside her. Bev saw us and wheeled Clarence to the far side of the room so we would have the window to ourselves.

“My husband’s name was Lyle,” Irene said. “We farmed the place across the road from your folks when you were little. You wouldn’t remember. You were a little bit of a thing. Five, maybe.”

“I don’t remember,” I said.

“No. Your mother made sure of that.” She folded her hands. “It was October of 1987. Your dad was hauling corn out of the bin to the elevator.”

“He’d started the unloading auger and he’d walked to the machine shed for one minute. One minute, he always said. To get his gloves.”

I knew how this went. Every farm kid in Iowa knows how this goes. I felt my hands go cold in my lap.

“Your brother was nine. He’d been told a hundred times to stay out of that bin. But there was a crust on the corn, and he thought he could walk on it, the way boys do.”

“He climbed in the top hatch to look. The crust broke, and the auger was running underneath him, and he went down.”

She said it plainly, the way you would say it if you had told it in your head a thousand times and never once out loud.

“Your mother was hanging wash. She heard him holler once and then she didn’t hear him at all.”

“She ran across the road screaming for Lyle, because Lyle was right there at the fence line fixing wire, and your dad was in the machine shed with the air compressor running, where he couldn’t hear.”

“Lyle shut the auger off,” Irene said. “Then he went up the side of that bin and in the top hatch with a rope tied around his waist, and your mother held the other end around the ladder.”

“He went down into that corn after your brother. He got hold of him by the back of his coat and held his face up out of it.”

“Corn doesn’t let go of you. You know that. It sets up around you like concrete. Lyle held Craig’s head up out of the corn for forty minutes, until the fire department from town got there and cut the side of the bin.”

I couldn’t say anything at all.

“When they got them out, your brother was gray and he wasn’t breathing right, but he lived. Lyle crushed two discs in his back holding on, the way the corn pulled against him.”

“He never farmed again. He couldn’t sit on a tractor. We sold out the next spring and moved down here near my sister, and he kept books for the co-op the rest of his working life.”

She opened the drawer again and touched the edge of the school picture with one finger.

“Your folks came to see him in the hospital. Your mother brought that picture. She said, ‘I want you to have the face of the boy you saved.'”

“Lyle kept it in his billfold for thirty years. When his billfold wore out, I put it in this drawer.”