The Last Bed of the Harvest

They wrapped him in a moving blanket from the shop and Keith drove him to the hospital in Tomah himself. Grandpa was fine. Cold, bruised, embarrassed. They kept him overnight to be safe.

My mother drove over from Wausau. I came straight from work in my scrubs. When I walked in, Keith was sitting in the hallway with his elbows on his knees, still in his wet jeans, staring at the floor.

“I thought he was gone, Molly,” he said. “I saw that cap and I thought he was gone.”

I sat down next to him and put my hand on his back. My uncle is not a hugger.

He is a big, quiet man who fixes pumps and pays bills and worries about the price of berries. But he let me sit there.

Grandpa finished the harvest that year from the seat of his truck, watching. He said he was fine.

He patched the torn waders himself at his kitchen table with a repair kit from the farm store, and he hung them on the hook by his back door for next year.

Nobody said anything more about the ditch all winter. I thought it was over. I did not know Keith had been carrying it around for eleven months.

A month without the marsh

After that first morning of harvest, Grandpa stayed home.

I went to see him on Tuesday after work. I am a dental hygienist at a practice in Tomah, and I get done at four.

It is about fifteen minutes up the interstate to Warrens. I brought him a pasty from the gas station because he likes them and will not buy them for himself.

He was sitting at his kitchen table with the radio on. The farm report was reading off prices. He had a cup of coffee in front of him that had gone cold, and he had not touched the newspaper.

“Did they get bed 4 done?” he asked before I had my coat off.

“I don’t know, Grandpa. I didn’t go out.”

“They’ll want to do 4 before the wind turns. If they leave it, the berries pile up on the east dike and Marcus will be in there till dark.”

I sat down across from him. He did not ask me why Keith had done it. He did not say one word against his son. He just asked about the beds, one at a time, like a man asking after his children.

The next week it was the same. And the week after that, he had stopped asking. He sat at the table with the radio and the cold coffee, and he talked about the weather and about Eli’s school and about nothing.

My grandfather has never been a man who sits. He mowed the church lawn until he was 79. He fixes his own gutters.

He drives his own truck to the elevator in Tomah to buy bird seed in fifty pound bags. But he sat at that table for a month.

The hook by his back door was empty. I asked him once where his old waders were.

“Left them at the shop,” he said. “Keith can throw them out.”

That was when I started to get scared.