The Notice After the Last Beans

The question nobody asks out loud

People have asked me since why we didn’t just sit his folks down and demand back pay, or see somebody about it.

There was no contract. There never had been. It was family pay on a handshake, the way half the farms in this county run, and we were never going to sue Nate’s parents. We would have lost the family to win the money.

All we could do was stop working for nothing. That was the only honest move we had.

We talked about it every night for two weeks, in the single-wide, with the furnace not yet on and the windows open to the sound of combines working late across the county.

“If we go now, it hurts him in the middle of harvest,” Nate said. “He can’t run the cart and the combine and the semi. He’ll lose a week. Maybe more.”

“I don’t want to hurt him,” I said.

“Neither do I. I want him paid back for nothing. I just want him to see us.”

So we decided. We would finish. We would get every bushel out of every field on that place, the way we had for ten years. Then, when the last beans were in, we would give our notice.

Nate called Paul that Sunday night and said yes, but after harvest. Paul said that was exactly the answer he would have wanted from a son of his.

The last beans

It was a wet fall. We had a low spot on the bottom ground along the creek that stayed soft into October, so the corn came off first and the last eighty acres of beans waited for a dry week.

They came off on a Thursday, the twenty second of October. I ran the cart alongside Nate in the combine until almost dark, and then I pulled up beside the semi and dumped the last load, and that was it.

That was ten years of harvests on that place. I sat in the tractor cab for a minute after the auger stopped and just looked at the stubble.

Nate climbed down out of the combine and walked over and opened my cab door. He didn’t say anything. He just put his hand on my knee.

We went in and washed up and walked over to his folks’ house for supper. Judy had made a roast because it was the last field. She always made a roast for the last field.

Vern said grace. We ate. Vern talked about yields on the bottom ground, which were better than he expected. Judy talked about Tiffany and Kyle’s new house in Peru.

When the pie was cut, Nate reached into his coat on the back of the chair and took out a folded sheet of paper.

I had written it in my handwriting on a page from the ledger pad. Both our names were signed at the bottom. It was four sentences long.

Nate smoothed it out flat and slid it across the table to his father.

“We’ll get the combine blown out and greased and put away, and we’ll level the bins and haul what’s due at the elevator,” Nate said. “That’ll take about a week. Then we’re done, Dad.”

Vern looked at the paper. He did not pick it up.

“Paul Engstrom offered us work,” Nate said. “We’re going to take it. We’ll be across the road.”

Judy put her hand over her mouth.

Vern read the paper twice. I watched his eyes go down it and come back up and go down it again.

“Is this about money,” he said. It was not quite a question.

“It’s about ten years at eighteen thousand,” Nate said. “It’s about asking for five hundred more in March and being told there wasn’t any.”