The Combine Keys at Harvest Supper
“And if the day comes that I sell it, or I’m gone, you get the first chance to buy every acre at what the appraiser said it was worth when your dad died. Not today’s price. Dale’s price. I’ve already called the boys and told them. Brad said fine, Mom, a little too fast. Kyle still hasn’t called back. That’s between me and them now.”
She took a breath and held the coffee cup tighter.
“That’s the land,” she said. “That’s the easy part. The hard part is this. I want you at my table on Sundays. Not harvest. Sundays. Ordinary Sundays when there’s nothing to cut and nothing to haul. I don’t want a hired man. I want somebody who sits down and eats with me and tells me if the bin fan sounds wrong.”
I don’t think I’ve ever had anybody ask me for something that plain in my whole life. I set the thermos lid on the fence post and I put my arms around my stepmother for the first time in fourteen years, right there on the headland.
She was smaller than I thought. She held on a long time.
“I’m sorry about the beans,” she said into my coat.
“I’m sorry about Sundays,” I said.
When I let go, Arlen was standing by the grain cart down the end row, pretending to look at a tire.
He’d heard enough of it, I guess, because when I walked over to him he didn’t let me say a word.
“Go,” he said. “Her beans can’t wait and my corn can. I’ll get my nephew down from Spencer for a few days. Go on, Mark. Your dad would have kicked you all the way over there by now.”
“I’ll come back nights and help you finish,” I said.
“I know you will,” he said, and clapped me on the shoulder, hard, the way Dad used to. “Marcy’s still setting your plate either way. Don’t make her mad by not showing up.”
I drove my pickup the mile west behind Elaine’s car. Ron’s truck was already in the yard, because Elaine had called him from the field before she ever got out of the car, I found out later.
Deb pulled in twenty minutes after. Nobody said much. Ron shook my hand. Deb hugged me, quick, and went to start the cart tractor.
The combine keys were sitting on the kitchen counter, where somebody had moved them when the plates were cleared ten days before.
Nobody had touched them since. I picked them up off the counter, and the brass tag from the old dealer in Sheldon was cold in my hand.
We ran beans that afternoon and the next two days, sunup until the dew. It wasn’t pretty. The beans on the east side had been rained on twice and dried twice and some of those pods just exploded when the reel touched them.
Every round I could see what we were leaving on the ground behind the head.
When it was all cut, the east field made 51 bushels an acre. The year before it had made 60.
Call it nine bushels an acre on 160 acres, close to 1,500 bushels, and at the elevator in Sanborn that fall beans were about ten dollars.
Somewhere around $14,000 lay on the ground in that field when we were done.
Elaine never once complained about it. She came out to the field at ten every morning with Dad’s thermos and a sack of sandwiches, and she stood at the end row and waited while I unloaded on the go.