The Notice After the Last Beans

Across the road

Paul Engstrom farmed the nine hundred acres across the blacktop from us. He was seventy that summer and still climbed into his own combine every fall.

His wife, Margaret, had passed four years before. His son was an engineer in Denver. His daughter taught fourth grade in Champaign. Neither of them was ever coming back to farm, and Paul said so without any bitterness at all.

“They’ve got good lives,” he told me once at the mailboxes. “I didn’t raise them to come back. I raised them to be happy. They are.”

His hired man, a quiet fellow named Mike who had been with him nineteen years, retired in July and moved down to Tennessee to be near his grandkids.

Paul came over the first week of September to borrow a chain binder. He found Nate and me in the shop putting new knife sections on the bean head.

He stood in the big door for a minute with his hands in his coat pockets, watching us work.

“You two are the best pair I’ve seen in this county in a long time,” he said. “I’m not saying that to be nice.”

“Thanks, Paul,” Nate said.

“I’m going to say one more thing, and then I’m going to take my binder and go home and never bring it up again if you don’t want me to.”

Nate set the wrench down.

“I need a man and I need somebody who can keep books,” Paul said. “Fifty two thousand for you, Nate. Twenty two an hour for Holly, for the cart in fall and the books all year. And the old house is empty. You can have it, utilities paid.”

The old house was the white farmhouse on his place where Paul’s parents had lived. It had a furnace that worked and a kitchen with a window over the sink that looked east across the fields.

Nobody said anything.

“I’m not trying to steal anybody from Vern,” Paul said. “I’ve known Vern sixty years. I’ll go tell him myself, man to man, if it ever comes to that. You think it over.”

He took his chain binder and walked back across the road.