The Grain Cart Seat I Drove for Free

I want to be fair to him. He was never cruel to me. He came to my volleyball games when he could. He taught me to back a trailer when I was thirteen, standing behind me in the yard and saying “easy, easy” until I got it.

He taught me to drive the grain cart the next fall. I was fourteen that year, and I mostly rode along. By fifteen I was running it alone, and by sixteen I was running it better than Trent.

That isn’t bragging. Lonnie said so himself once, at supper, before he caught himself. “Hailey keeps the cart right where I want it,” he said. “Never have to look for her.” Then he went back to his potatoes.

Running a grain cart is not just sitting in a tractor. You have to match the combine’s speed in the field and pull up alongside so the operator can unload on the go without stopping.

If you’re too far back, he spills corn on the ground. If you’re too close, you can catch the unloading auger. You watch the spout and the cart and the ground under your tires all at once, for hours.

Then you haul the full cart to the semis at the field edge and fold the auger out and fill the trucks without spilling, and you get back out to the combine before the hopper fills again.

On a good day the combine never stops. That was my whole job, keeping that machine from ever having to wait. I was proud of how seldom it did.

Trent and I split the cart. On school days he ran it in the mornings after he graduated, and I ran it in the afternoons and into the night. On weekends we traded off by the half day.

Same seat. Same tractor. Same corn. Give or take a supper, the same hours.

I knew the hours were the same because I wrote mine down. I had a spiral notebook with a green cover that lived in the door pocket of the tractor, and every shift went into it in pencil.

Date, start time, end time, field. I started it the fall I was fifteen because a teacher at school told us to keep track of our work hours for a scholarship form. I just never stopped.

By that October afternoon there were five years in it. Sixteen pages of my handwriting getting a little neater each year.

I didn’t understand Lonnie’s three words until I was eighteen. Mom told me the story one night when we were doing dishes and he had gone out to check the dryer.

Lonnie grew up on a farm near Montevideo, about thirty-five miles south of us. His dad, Harold, was a hard man in a hard time, and the farm barely made it through the eighties.

Lonnie had two older sisters, Karen and Sue. They milked, they drove tractor, they cooked for the haying crew every summer. They worked for room and board and nobody ever asked them if that was all right.

He also had an older brother named Mike. Mike worked that farm from the time he could reach the pedals, and Harold never paid him a single dollar. “It’ll all be yours someday,” was what Harold said.

When Mike was nineteen, he asked for wages. Harold said no. Mike packed a duffel bag and drove to the Cities and got a job at a printing plant, and he never came back to farm.