The Keys He Threw Into The Beans

And the forecast on the radio that morning said rain by Sunday night, an inch or more, with a cold front behind it that could keep us out of the field for a week.

Twelve acres of beans left standing through that is how you lose a crop.

So I did not call the sheriff. I took off one glove and I called Don Halverson.

Don is seventy. He and Barb have farmed across the road and a half mile west of us for my whole married life.

He helped Morris’s dad pour the slab for our machine shed in 1979, and he was one of the six men who carried Morris out of the church.

He answered on the second ring.

“Anna. You need a hand on something?”

I told him. I told it flat, the way you would tell somebody a tire had gone flat on the highway. He listened without saying a word until I was finished.

“Where’d they land?” he asked.

“West of the third terrace. Maybe forty rows in. Maybe sixty. I didn’t see where they dropped.”

There was a quiet on the line. I could hear his television in the background, the Iowa State game, and then the sound of it going off.

“Stay put,” Don said. “Don’t go wading out there by yourself and stomp them deeper. I’ll make some calls.”

I want to say I waited calmly. I didn’t. I walked around the combine twice, and then I climbed up on the step and looked out over the field like I might see the sun glint on brass, and of course I saw nothing but beans.

Tan beans. Miles of them, it felt like, the pods hanging heavy and the leaves long since dropped.

When the wind moved through them they made a sound like someone whispering in the next room.

Ethan stayed with me. He did not say much. He went back to the tractor and got a thermos of coffee his grandma had sent along at noon and poured me a cup in the lid, and he stood there while I drank it.

“Grandpa’s calling the Brandt boys,” he said. “And my dad. And probably everybody.”

“He doesn’t have to do that.”

Ethan looked at me like I had said something in a foreign language. “Yes he does,” he said.

The first pickup came down the gravel about forty minutes later. It was Don and Barb.

Barb got out with a laundry basket full of ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper and a nine by thirteen pan of scotcheroos, because Barb Halverson has never once in her life gone to help anybody without food.

She set the basket on the hood of Don’s pickup and came straight over and put her arms around me. She did not say a thing.

She just held on for a while, and then she let go and handed me a sandwich and told me to eat it.

Then came Ethan’s dad, Morris’s old friend from high school, a big quiet man who works for the county road crew and farms on the side.

He brought two of his own flashlights and a box of batteries.

Then the Brandt brothers, who are in their fifties and farm eleven hundred acres together north of Highway 3.

They had been cutting their own beans that afternoon with the same rain forecast as me. They shut down early and came anyway.