Five Thousand Dollars At The Elevator Scale

I don’t ask her for much. I asked her to put the phone down and sit, and after a minute she did, at the little table with the baby monitor hissing.

“If you call him,” I said, “he’ll be ashamed and mad, and he’ll dig in. He’ll say I’m too proud to take help. And maybe I am. But this is between him and me now. Let me handle it my way.”

“What way is that?”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’m going to run his combine. Whatever else, the man needs his corn out, and I’m not going to let your dad’s ground sit there.”

Amber put her face in her hands for a minute. When she looked up, her eyes were wet, and she wasn’t mad at me anymore. She was scared for her brother.

“He’s in trouble, Brett,” she said. “Real trouble. He’d have to be, to say that to you.”

“I know.”

I want it on the record that Amber took his side as much as mine that night. She loved her brother.

She knew he wasn’t cruel. She knew he was scared and proud, which on a farm can look a lot like cruel from across a yard.

Harvest started the last week of September with beans. Curtis ran those himself in the days, because beans won’t go at night once the dew comes down.

When he switched to corn in early October, I started my nights.

I worked at the truck shop from seven to five thirty. I’d eat a sandwich on the twenty minute drive out to the farm and be in the combine cab by six, while Curtis climbed into the tractor on the grain cart.

His combine was a John Deere 9770, an older machine with an eight row corn head and a lot of hours.

A diesel mechanic on a combine like that is a lucky thing for a farmer. I kept it running, and I’ll say that’s worth something too.

The first week, the feeder house chain started slapping. I heard it before the monitor showed anything.

We shut it down at one in the morning and I fixed it with a headlamp and the tools out of my truck while Curtis held the light and handed me what I asked for.

“Thanks,” he said when it was done. That was most of what we said, most nights. He’d bring supper in a cooler, Gail’s ham sandwiches and a thermos of coffee, and leave it in the cab, and then he’d go back to his tractor.

Some nights the moon came up orange over the rows. I’d watch the corn head take eight rows at a time into the lights, and the yield numbers would come up on the monitor, and I’d think about my kids asleep in town.

I’d get home after one. I’d look in on Jace and Jolie, sleeping in the room they shared, and stand there in the doorway smelling like corn dust and diesel.

Then I’d sleep five hours and get up and go fix somebody’s semi.

Jace started asking questions. He was four now and he wanted to know everything.

One morning at breakfast he looked at me with his spoon in the air and asked if I was combining Uncle Curt’s corn all night.

“Not all night,” I said. “Till the stars are all the way out.”

“Can I come?”

“You’ve got school in the morning, buddy. Preschool waits for nobody.”