The Keys He Threw Into The Beans

He left without arguing. I thought that was the end. I should have known better, because Truman had never once in his life left anything alone that he had set his mind on.

So now here we were, out on the west side of the eighty on a bright cold Saturday, with the combine stopped and the header full of vines, and Truman had come up the field road too fast with that same paper folded in his shirt pocket.

I had climbed down to pull a wad of green stems out of the reel.

The beans on that end of the field always stayed a little tough because of the low spot by the third terrace, and the vines wrapped up the header if you pushed too fast.

I was standing there with my gloves full of stems when he walked up.

“Sign it,” he said. “Six thousand. I already talked to the bank. They’ll close it before Thanksgiving.”

“I told you no on Tuesday.”

“You told me no because you’re grieving. I get that. I’m asking you to think like a farmer.”

I looked at him then. Really looked. He had lost weight since the funeral, and he had not shaved, and his eyes had a red, scraped look that I took for anger. I know now it was not anger.

“I am thinking like a farmer,” I said. “That’s why I’m out here cutting beans instead of signing papers at the bank.”

Ethan Halverson sat up in the grain cart tractor about forty feet away, the auger still swung out, waiting for me to unload.

He is seventeen, Don Halverson’s grandson, and he had been driving cart for us since he was fourteen.

He looked down at his boots. I did not blame him. A boy that age has no business stepping between two grown people who are both half out of their minds with grief.

Truman glanced at Ethan, and then at me, and then he leaned into the open cab of the combine.

I thought he was going to shut it off, since I had left it idling. Instead he turned the key and pulled the whole ring.

Morris’s ring. The combine key, the tractor keys, the shop padlock key, and the little brass key to the fuel barrel, all on one heavy loop with a plastic tag from the seed dealer.

“Truman,” I said.

That was all I got out before he threw them.

He did not say anything else worth repeating. He walked back to his pickup and drove off down the field road, and the dust hung in the air behind him for a long time in the still afternoon light.

Ethan climbed down out of the tractor and came over slowly.

“I’m sorry, Anna,” he said. “I should have said something.”

“No,” I said. “You shouldn’t have. That wasn’t yours to carry.”

I want to be honest about the next minute, because people have asked me since why I didn’t do the obvious thing.

I did think about calling the sheriff. I had the phone in my hand.

But a deputy cannot find one key ring in eighty acres of standing beans any better than I could.

The dealer in Hampton closes at noon on Saturdays, and a new combine key would have to wait until Monday.