The Last Bed of the Harvest

Keith

My uncle had been up at the pump house on the reservoir, getting ready to shut the flood pump down for the year.

Somebody must have radioed him. He came down the dike in his own waders with his cap pushed back and his face gone white.

He stopped right at the edge of the bed. He looked at his father, waist deep in the berries, pulling that old ash boom.

Then he looked down the dike at the crew he had given that order to, a month before, in front of all of them.

Rudy, Marcus and Joe looked right back at him. Tina folded her arms.

I did not say a word. It was not my place. I had brought the waders and that was all. Whatever happened next belonged to the two of them.

Keith took one step down the bank. “Dad.”

Grandpa did not stop pulling. He did not turn around. He just said, “I’m almost to the middle, son. Wind’s out of the west. You’ll want to set the pump hose a little south.”

Keith opened his mouth and closed it again.

And then Rudy did something I will remember for the rest of my life.

He walked down the dike to where Grandpa was, sat down on the edge of the bank, and slid into the bed beside him.

He did not look at Keith. He did not ask anyone. He just took hold of the boom a couple of feet down from Grandpa’s hands and started to pull.

Marcus went in next. Then Joe. Three grown men, all of them trained by my grandfather, all of them knowing exactly what Keith had said about anybody who let him in the water. They climbed down into that bed beside him without one word between them.

They did not do it to make a point to Keith. You could see that.

They did it so the old man would not be alone in the water. Rudy took the deep side, between Grandpa and the ditch, and kept his shoulder close.

Tina stayed on the dike. Somebody had to run the pump, she told me later, and she was not about to cry in front of the boys.

Keith stood on the edge of the dike for a long minute. Maybe longer. Nobody hurried him. The berries kept rolling toward the corner, and the evening light kept softening, and my uncle just stood there with his hands hanging at his sides.

I watched his face. I saw him remember the ditch, and the cap floating, and the hospital hallway in wet jeans. And then I saw something else come in behind all that, something older.

He stepped down into the bed. He waded across to the other end of the old wooden boom, the end nobody was holding, and he took hold of it with both hands.

Grandpa looked over at him for the first time.

“You remember how?” Grandpa asked.

“You taught me,” Keith said. His voice was rough. “I was eight. You put me on the other end and told me to lean when you leaned.”

“Then lean,” Grandpa said.

And they did. Father and son, one at each end of that ash boom his own father had made, with three men he had trained pulling in the middle.

They pulled the last bed of the year the way they had when Keith was a boy.