The Combine Keys at Harvest Supper
“I’m sorry,” I said, and I meant it.
“I’m sixty-seven years old and I live alone in a house with five bedrooms on a gravel road,” she said.
“Some nights I can’t sleep for thinking that I’m going to die in that house and it’ll be a week before anybody notices. And I thought, if the land was theirs, they’d have to come. They’d have to come home and look at it. They’d have to come see me.”
She finally looked at me then. “I thought the land was the only thing I had that would bring them home,” she said.
“That’s the whole reason. It’s a foolish one. I know that now. I knew it at the supper table, when you set those keys down. I just couldn’t say it in front of everybody.”
I stood there with Dad’s thermos in my hand and felt about two feet tall, because she wasn’t done.
“And you,” she said, and her voice got softer, not harder. “Mark, you only ever came in the house at harvest. Fourteen years. You ate my roast beef three weeks out of the year and then you were gone again. You never sat at my table on a Sunday.”
She swallowed. “Not once. Not even after your dad died. I thought you didn’t want anything to do with me. I thought you only wanted the ground.”
That one hit me square, because it was true. Not the part about only wanting the ground. But the rest of it was true, every word.
I’d stayed out of her kitchen for fourteen years and called it respect, and she’d sat in that big house and called it what it looked like.
“Elaine,” I said. “I stayed out because I thought it was your house. Yours and Dad’s. And after Dad, I didn’t know how to come in that door with him not sitting there. I ate in the pickup because it was easier than looking at his chair. That’s the truth. It wasn’t you. It was never you. I should have said so two years ago.”
She nodded and wiped her eyes with the back of her hand. A pheasant got up out of the fence line behind her and flew off cackling, and we both watched it go, because it was easier than looking at each other.
“I drove to Primghar yesterday,” she said. “I didn’t sign anything, I just asked. I’m not trying to buy you back with paper, Mark.
The lawyer says the lease and the first chance to buy get written so they bind whoever holds the land after me. I want you to know that. But I’ve thought about this every night for ten days, and I want to say it out loud to you, standing here, where your dad would have been.”
“All right,” I said.
“Come home and finish the beans. Finish the corn. I’ll pay what Arlen’s paying you, it’s only fair. Then next spring I want you to farm it as yours. A cash lease, all 600 acres, written down this time, at a fair rate. Arlen says $300 an acre is what ground goes for around here, and that’s what I’ll ask, no more.”
I stood there with my mouth open. She wasn’t finished.