The Keys He Threw Into The Beans

Then a woman from church I barely knew, who had heard from her sister, who had heard from Barb.

Then two of the young guys who drive semi for the co-op in Latimer on weekends. Then a retired teacher and her husband from a mile east.

By the time the sun was going down there were eleven of them. I counted. I counted them twice, because I did not trust myself to believe it. Ethan went out with them and made twelve.

Don lined them up along the end rows like he was setting out a seed planter.

One person every other row, thirty inches between rows in that field, so the whole line covered maybe fifty feet of beans at a pass.

“Walk slow,” he said. “Bend over. Light straight down, not out ahead. Look at the ground, not the plants. They’ll have dropped through to the dirt.”

They all wore what people in Iowa wear in October after supper: hunting jackets, chore coats, the orange vests some of them kept in their pickups for pheasant season, a couple of navy county work jackets. Orange and blue, the whole line of them.

The light went gold, and then it went gray, and they started walking west into the rows with their flashlights pointed at the ground.

I stood on the step of the green combine in my gray hoodie, my dark hair pulled back in the same bun I had worn for three weeks because it was the only thing I could manage in the morning. I still had my work gloves on.

Don had asked me to stay at the machine so they would have something to walk back to.

I turned on the cab light so it glowed up there like a porch light, and I stood under it and watched the flashlights move away from me in a slow, wavering line.

It is a strange thing to stand still while other people search for something you lost. You want to help.

You want to apologize for making them come. And underneath both of those you are so grateful you cannot stand up straight.

Morris’s mother, Mabel, called me while they were walking. She is seventy-three and lives in a little ranch house in Hampton, three blocks from the Lutheran church.

She had come out to the farm that morning to watch Henry while I cut, and she had taken him to town for supper.

“Barb called me,” she said.

“I’m sorry, Mabel.”

“Don’t you dare be sorry.” Her voice was steady, but I could hear it costing her something. “Henry’s asleep on my couch. He doesn’t know. I want you to know I’m not going to tell him.”

“Thank you.”

“Anna.” She was quiet for a second. “I already know which one of my boys did this. I only have one left.”

I did not answer. There was nothing I could have said that would not have hurt her more.

The line got to the far end of the low spot and turned around and came back, a few rows over. Then they turned again.

The flashlights bobbed and swung, and every now and then somebody would stop and crouch, and my heart would jump, and then they would stand up again and keep walking.

Barb had stayed back with me for the first pass, and then she said her eyes were as good as anybody’s and went out to fill in a gap where one of the co-op boys had stopped to answer a call.