The Grain Cart Seat I Drove for Free

I climbed back up into the cab one more time. I took nothing, because nothing in there was mine except my thermos and my gloves. I got those.

Then I looked at the green notebook in the door pocket. I thought about taking it. I left it right where it was.

I don’t fully know why. Maybe I wanted somebody to find it someday. Maybe I just didn’t want to carry it anymore.

I climbed down and walked across the stubble toward the road. Behind me, I heard the tractor door close and the engine come up. Trent had climbed back into the seat to finish my shift.

I was in Marcy’s yard at eight the next morning. She had the combine fueled and greased and the corn head on, and she walked me around it once like a car salesman.

It was a John Deere S780 with a twelve-row head, newer than anything Lonnie owned. The cab was quiet enough to hear yourself think, and the seat had more adjustments than my car.

Marcy climbed up with me for the first two rounds. She showed me the yield monitor, how to set the header height, how to read the grain loss. Then she climbed down and said, “Go.”

So I went.

There is nothing in the world like running a combine through standing corn on a clear fall day. The head takes the rows in like it’s eating them. The bin fills behind you, and you can see for miles.

Dale ran Marcy’s grain cart. He was sixty-one, with a bad back and a good sense of humor, and he talked to me on the radio all day long about the Vikings and the price of corn.

“You’re making me look slow,” he said once, about the third day.

“You’re doing fine, Dale,” I said.

“I’m doing fine for a man with a back like a bag of gravel,” he said. “That’s different from fine.”

At noon Marcy drove out to the field with lunch. Ham sandwiches on white bread, a thermos of coffee, a bag of potato chips, and a pan of scotcheroos that she cut into squares right on the tailgate.

“You’re smoother than our last guy,” she told me on the second day. “Don’t tell him I said that.”

I laughed. I hadn’t laughed in the field in a long time. I hadn’t known I wasn’t laughing until I started again.

She paid me every Friday. A check, made out to Hailey Kruse, in her own handwriting. The first one was for a little over nine hundred dollars.

I sat in my car in her yard with that check on the steering wheel and cried. Not because of the money. Because somebody had looked at my work and written down what it was worth.

Lonnie hired Les Halvorson to run his cart. Les had retired from the co-op elevator in Benson the year before. He was seventy-one and he’d been driving tractors since he was ten.

Les was a good man, and he was careful. Careful is the right way to be at seventy-one. But careful is slow, and a grain cart can’t be slow.

From the cab of Marcy’s combine I could see Lonnie’s north fields across the road. Some afternoons I watched his combine sit still at the end of a row with its hopper full, waiting.

Sometimes it waited ten minutes. One afternoon it waited the better part of an hour, because Les got the cart stuck in a wet spot by the drainage ditch and Lonnie had to bring the other tractor out from the yard and pull him free.