The Keys He Threw Into The Beans

It was getting cold. The wind had come around to the north the way it does before a front.

I could smell the dust coming off the field and the diesel from Ethan’s tractor and, from somewhere, a neighbor burning leaves.

About the time the last pink went out of the sky, a voice came up out of the beans, high and surprised.

“Got ’em!”

It was Barb. She was standing about seventy rows in, holding the key ring up over her head the way a person holds up a walleye at the lake, and every flashlight in that field swung toward her at once.

I do not remember walking out there. I remember being there, the beans scratching at my jeans, and Barb putting that heavy ring into my glove, and the cold of the metal coming through the leather.

“Hung up on a stalk about a foot off the ground,” she said. “Like it was waiting for you.”

I said thank you to her. Then I turned around and said it to all of them, as loud as I could, which was not very loud.

Nobody made a speech. The Brandt brothers just nodded and started back toward their pickups. One of the co-op boys said, “Glad we got ’em,” and somebody else said, “Rain’s coming, though,” and everybody agreed the rain was coming, the way people do.

That was it. That is how people out here tell you they love you. They say rain’s coming, and they get back in their pickups.

Don stayed. He waited until the others had pulled out, their taillights going off down the gravel one after the other, and then he walked over and stood beside me at the combine step.

“Anna,” he said, “you ever wonder why Truman’s forty across the road is still standing?”

I hadn’t. I realized it right then. Truman’s forty sits directly across the gravel from our eighty, the only ground he owns, and every other bean field on our road had been cut that week.

His was still standing tan and full in the dark.

“I hadn’t noticed,” I said. “I haven’t noticed much.”

“He sold his combine,” Don said. “In August. To a fellow up by Clear Lake. He had a note come due at the bank, and they wouldn’t renew it without a paydown, so he sold the combine.”

I just stood there.

“He was going to run Morris’s,” Don said. “That was the deal, I guess. Morris told me in the summer. Said they’d do Truman’s forty and his rented ground right after the home eighty, same as they used to when their dad was alive. One combine, one cart, everybody working together.”

“Morris never said a word to me.”

“I don’t suppose Truman wanted anybody to know.” Don rubbed the back of his neck. “I’m not saying what he did today was right. It wasn’t. I’m saying a man doesn’t throw keys in a field because he’s mean. He does it because he’s scared and he can’t find any other door.”

I drove home with the keys on the seat beside me. I did not go to bed for a long time.

I sat on the back step under the yard light with Morris’s chore coat around my shoulders and looked at the dark field across the road.