Dale took a breath. “Your dad can follow us in his pickup,” he said. “There’s work for him too, if he’ll take it. Kevin quit on me and I’m about dead on my feet.”
So Owen climbed up into that red International, up the step and into the passenger side with the dented door. Dale drove onto the pit and dumped, and Owen watched out the window as his grandpa’s corn went down the grate and up the belt and out the end of the stacker onto the pile on my floor.
Then they rolled back across the scale to weigh out empty. The girl at the window handed Dale his ticket, and Dale handed it to Owen to hold. I watched through the windshield as Owen held it on his knees with both hands like it was a diploma.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
I followed them east to Dale’s place with Katie’s thermos rattling in the cup holder. I called her from the road.
“Well?” she said.
“He’s in the truck with your dad.”
She didn’t say anything for a while. I could hear her breathing. Then she said, “I’m making a field supper,” and hung up.
Dale’s field was the half section along the creek, 320 acres, and about half of it was still standing, tall dry corn rattling in the south breeze. The combine sat at the end of the rows where he’d left it at dark the night before, a green John Deere with a corn head on the front.
Dale climbed up the ladder first and Owen came after him, and Dale reached down and pulled him up by the hood of his sweatshirt the last step. They went inside the cab, and I saw Dale fold down the little trainer seat beside his, the one farmers call the buddy seat, and pat it.
Before he climbed in, Dale came back out on the platform and called down to me.
“You still got your license from driving mixer?”
“I do.”
“Truck’s there. When the hopper’s full I’ll unload into it on the go. You haul it to Randy. We’ll keep it moving.”
He didn’t say please. He didn’t say thank you. But he tossed me the keys to that red International, underhand, and that’s more than he’d done in twelve years. In Dale’s language that was a whole paragraph.
So that afternoon I hauled corn. I’m a concrete man, but I grew up under trucks, and an old straight truck with a manual box is not that different from a mixer. I made three trips to the co-op and back, and every time I pulled onto that scale I looked down at the corner.
Out in the field, Owen rode in the buddy seat all afternoon. I’d see the combine coming down the rows when I pulled up with the empty truck, the head eating the corn and the dust rolling up gold behind it. I could see Owen’s face in the glass, up high, about a foot from his grandpa’s.
Dale had the unloading auger swing out over my truck while he kept moving, the corn pouring down into the box, and I drove alongside him matching his speed. That takes some doing. He nodded at me through the glass when the truck was full. Just once. That was enough.
Around four, Katie drove out with a field supper in the back seat of her car. Roast beef sandwiches wrapped in foil, a cooler of tea, two pans of bars, and Jan’s potato salad in an ice cream bucket. Jan came with her.