The Combine Keys at Harvest Supper
Marcy said, “Honey, I’ve been over there twice already this week. She’s all right. She’s not eating much, but she’s all right.”
That was day nine. On day ten, a Friday, the ground had dried enough to run, and Arlen and I were back in his corn on the west quarter, the one that runs right up against the Ehlers line.
It was cool and bright, the kind of October day you remember in February.
About ten in the morning, Arlen came on the radio from the grain cart. “Mark,” he said. “Better shut her down a minute. Your stepmother is standing at the end of the row.”
I looked out the side glass of the cab. At the end of the field, on the headland by the fence, there was Elaine’s car parked on the field road, and Elaine was standing in the stubble alone with her arms around something.
I throttled down and shut the combine off and climbed down the ladder.
It’s a long walk down a corn row when you don’t know what’s waiting at the end of it. The stalks were dry and they rattled.
I came out on the headland and there she was, a little ways from her car, in her barn jacket over a blue sweater, her silver hair blowing.
She was holding Dad’s old thermos.
I hadn’t seen it since the funeral. It was the green steel Stanley he’d carried every day of his farming life, dented on one side where it bounced off the tractor step in 1985.
He’d scratched his initials into the lid with a sixteen-penny nail when he was a young man, D.E., crooked letters, so nobody at the elevator would walk off with it.
“I made coffee,” Elaine said. Her voice shook a little. “Your dad always took coffee out at ten. I filled this every morning for twelve years. I didn’t know what else to bring. I didn’t know how to come out here with nothing in my hands.”
She held it out to me. I took it, and I put my thumb on those letters on the lid without even thinking, the way Dad used to rub them.
My throat closed up. I had to stand there a minute and look out at the field before I could say anything at all.
“Thank you,” I said. It was all I had.
Elaine looked at the stubble instead of at me. “The beans are going down,” she said.
“I suppose you’ve seen. I walked out in them yesterday. There’s beans all over the ground. Your dad would have had a fit.”
“I’ve seen,” I said.
“The custom man can’t come till November. Brad can’t get off work. Kyle hasn’t called me back in eleven days.”
She said it all flat, like she was reading a grocery list, but her chin was going.
“I wanted to tell you why I did it. I owe you that. I’ve been owing you that a long time.”
I unscrewed the lid and poured coffee into the cup part, and handed it to her, because she was shaking and it was something to do with her hands.
She held it with both hands and didn’t drink it.
“My boys don’t call me, Mark,” she said. “You know that. Christmas, my birthday, if I’m lucky. When their dad died I thought they’d come around more, and they didn’t. When Dale died I thought they’d come home for a while, and they flew in for two days and flew back out.”