The Buddy Seat I Gave My Granddaughter

Into The Corn

I let the engine warm a minute, the way Dale taught me. I ran through my checks out loud so Ava could hear me do it, because that is how you teach without making a lesson of it.

“Header’s up,” I said. “Reel speed’s set. We watch the header height so we take the ear and leave the dirt. You want to feel for it, right here.”

I laid my hand on the little knob and did not turn it, just showed her.

Then I eased us forward and dropped the corn head down into the first rows. The standing corn came at that glass like a wall, and I felt Ava flinch beside me.

“Watch,” I said.

The head took the stalks in, twelve rows at a time. The snapping rolls stripped the ears off clean and the stalks went down and the field just opened up in front of us.

Row after row folded into the machine. Up through the clear tube behind our heads the gold kernels came pouring into the tank where we could watch them pile.

“It’s eating it,” Ava said. I could barely hear her over the roar even with the muffs, so she said it again, louder. “Grandma, it’s eating the whole field.”

“It is,” I said. “And every kernel that goes in that tank is money in the spring. That is not play, what we are doing. That is the whole year coming home.”

I kept us at a steady clip, not racing. A combine is not a thing you race.

I watched the header and the feed and I let Ava watch the corn disappear.

A half mile off, Troy’s machine and ours were cutting the same crop, on the same morning, under the same blue sky.

From the road you could not have told which one had a little girl in it and which one had two boys. The corn does not know. The corn comes off the same.

The dust and the chaff hung in the air behind us, gold in the low sun. A red tail hawk sat up on the power pole at the end of the field, waiting for the mice we would turn up.

Off to the east the grain bins on the home place caught the sun like towers of light. A line of geese went over, headed for the river bottom.

This is October in our country. The whole county smells of cut cornstalks and dry dust, and every farm family is out from before light until past dark.

Ava watched that hawk. She watched the tank fill.

She watched my hands on the controls, and I saw her start to move her own hands a little, copying, resting them where mine rested.

I did not tell her to stop.