The Corn Dad Hauled Himself

A crop without a ladder

We live on twenty-some acres six miles from Dad, on the other side of town. Most of it was brome grass we let a neighbor cut for hay. It was good ground, flat, and it had been in corn before we bought the place.

The idea came together fast after that. Hollis could get the seed, and he would pay for it himself and bill Dad at harvest, the way any farmer gets billed. Orville Ahrens, who lives a mile west of us and still does custom planting and combining at sixty-eight, could plant it.

And at harvest, the corn would not go in any bin. It would go straight from the combine into Dad’s truck and straight from Dad’s truck to the elevator. No storage. No ladder. Nothing for anybody to climb.

I work at the county extension office. I have spent twenty years answering farmers’ questions about soil tests and seeding rates and when to spray. I know what twenty acres of dryland corn costs to put in, and I know what it might bring. I did the numbers that night on the back of an envelope.

Seed, fertilizer, Orville’s custom rates, a little herbicide. It would come to a few thousand dollars. If we got rain, twenty acres might make three thousand bushels or a little more. That was roughly ten loads in Dad’s old truck.

It would not make anybody rich. That was never the point.

Orville

I drove over to see Orville the next afternoon. He was in his shop greasing a planter, a twelve-row John Deere that was older than my son but kept like a church floor.

I told him what I wanted. I told him about the bins, which he already knew, because everybody in the county already knew. He listened with the grease gun in his hand.

“In your dad’s name,” he said.

“In his name. His crop. I’ll pay you, but the crop is his.”

Orville set the grease gun down on the planter frame. He had farmed next to Dad’s ground for forty years, and they had traded work at harvest more times than either of them could count.

“Floyd pulled me out of a ditch in the blizzard of ’97,” he said. “With a log chain and that red truck. I’ll plant it, Tammy. And you’re not paying me for it.”

“Orville, you have to let me pay you.”

“Then you can pay me in pie,” he said, and picked the grease gun back up. “First week of May, if it dries out.”

Telling Dad

I did not ask Dad first. I want to be honest about that. I was afraid he would say no, and I knew that if he said no, he would mean it, and he would sit in that kitchen until the Lord came for him.

So Hollis broke up the brome in late April with a disk he borrowed from Orville, twice over, and Orville planted it on the fifth of May in one long afternoon. I stood at the end of the field and watched the planter go back and forth, and I prayed the plainest prayer I know, which is just please.

Then I drove to Dad’s.

He was at the kitchen table, where he always was now. The seed corn calendar was still on February. I sat down across from him and slid a piece of paper over. It was the planting record Orville had written out by hand: date, hybrid, seeding rate, field, acres. At the top it said Operator: Floyd Vollmer.

Dad put on his reading glasses. He read it twice.

“What’s this,” he said.

“It’s your crop,” I said. “Twenty acres on our place. Orville planted it this afternoon. Hollis is billing you for the seed at harvest. It’s in your name at the co-op. You don’t have a single bin to climb. It goes from the combine to your truck to the elevator.”

He did not say anything for a long time. Outside, a meadowlark was singing on the fence by the empty pads.

“Your brother won’t like it,” he said.

“Randy doesn’t have to like it. It’s not Randy’s corn.”

Dad took his glasses off and rubbed his eyes with his thumb and finger. Then he stood up, slow, holding the table, and went to the wall and turned the calendar from February to May.

“Twenty-eight thousand seeds,” he said, looking at the planting record again. “Orville’s going thick for dryland.”

“Orville says you’ll say that.”

“Orville would know,” Dad said. And for the first time since March, I heard something in his voice that sounded like him.