The Corn Dad Hauled Himself

The man who built them

Those bins were not fancy. They were three round steel bins, the smallest about four thousand bushels and the other two a little bigger, the kind you see on half the farmsteads in south-central Nebraska, with the ladders up the side and the little caps on top.

Dad put up the first one in 1979, the year I was born. He and my mother poured the pad themselves with a borrowed mixer, and she wrote my initials and Randy’s in the wet concrete with a nail. The other two went up in the eighties, one in a good year and one in a year that was not.

Dad farmed six hundred acres most of his life. When Mom died nine years ago he rented most of it out to the Hesters down the road, but he kept back forty acres by the house. He said a man ought to have something to get up for.

He planted that forty every spring with his own planter, and every fall he hired the Hester boys to combine it and filled the bins himself. In winter he sold it off a few loads at a time, hauled in his old red grain truck to the co-op elevator in town.

That was the rhythm of his whole life. Plant, pray for rain, harvest, store, sell. My mother used to say the bins were Dad’s savings account and his church pew at the same time, because he did most of his worrying and most of his thanking up on top of them.

The truck was a 1974 Chevrolet with a sixteen-foot steel box and a hoist, single axle, painted red so many times it had a kind of thickness to it. It held a little over three hundred bushels if you heaped it. Randy had learned to drive in that truck. So had I.

The ladder

I should tell you what Randy saw, because I did not know it myself until much later, and it matters to everything that happened.

On the second Tuesday of March, Randy had driven out after closing his body shop to drop off a battery charger Dad wanted. It was getting dark. He found Dad lying at the foot of the middle bin with his arm folded under him and blood on his face, on the frozen ground, in the wind.

Dad had climbed up to latch the lid in the afternoon. His foot slipped on the fourth or fifth rung coming down, and he fell backward. He told the doctors he lay there maybe an hour. He could not get up because of the ribs and the wrist. He prayed, he said, and then he waited.

Randy called the ambulance and knelt on the ground holding Dad’s head in his lap until they came from town. He rode along to Kearney. I met them at the emergency room at ten that night, and Randy’s shirt still had Dad’s blood on it.

I knew all of that, more or less. What I did not know was what it did to my brother.

Dad comes home

Randy told Dad about the bins on the morning Dad was discharged. I was in the hallway signing papers, and when I came back into the room Dad was sitting on the edge of the bed in his clean shirt, looking at his hands.

“Randy says the bins are gone,” he said.

“I know, Dad. I saw.”

“Well.” He nodded a few times, slowly, the way he nods at a weather report he does not like but cannot argue with. “Well. I suppose that settles that.”

Randy stood by the window with his jaw tight. Nobody said anything else. The nurse came with the wheelchair and we took Dad down to my car and drove him home, forty miles, without the radio on.

When we turned into the yard Dad looked at the three gray pads for a long time. Then he got out by himself, which he was not supposed to do, and walked to the middle one. He stood there with his good hand on his ribs. I watched him find the corner where Mom had written our initials.

Then he went in the house and sat down at the kitchen table, and as far as I could tell, he did not get up again for most of April.