The Keys He Threw Into The Beans

It was too wet with dew to cut beans after dark. Everybody who farms beans knows that.

Once the dew comes down the pods get tough and the stems turn to rubber, and you just wrap up the machine and break things.

So there was nothing to do that night but think. And I thought about Truman.

I thought about the fall Morris and I got married, and Truman drove the grain cart for free because we could not afford to pay anybody.

I thought about him standing up at the reception with a speech he had written on the back of a feed store receipt.

I thought about the night Henry was born, and Truman sitting in the hospital parking lot in Mason City at two in the morning because he wasn’t allowed back yet, and he would not go home either.

And I thought about him at Morris’s funeral. He had stood with the other pallbearers, and when they lifted the casket his knees buckled, just for a second.

Don had caught his elbow. I had seen it, and I had not thought about it again until that night.

I did not forgive him that night. I want to be honest. I was still angry clear down to my feet.

But I understood, sitting there, that I did not know the whole of it, and I wanted to.

Sunday morning came up cold and clear and very still, with a hard gray dew on everything.

I went out at seven and walked the end rows and pulled a handful of pods and tried to split them with my thumbnail. Too tough. You have to wait.

At nine they were still tough. At ten they were close.

A little after eleven the sun had burned the last of the dew off the top of the canopy, and when I shelled a pod the beans came out hard and rattled in my palm.

I started the combine with Morris’s key.

Ethan was back in the cart by then. He had not been asked.

He had just shown up at ten thirty with his grandpa’s thermos and climbed up in the tractor, and when I waved at him he waved back like it was any other Sunday.

The twelve acres went fast. The low spot by the third terrace was still a little tough, and I took it slow, and the header only plugged once.

The yield monitor read fifty-eight bushels an acre in the good part of the field, which is about what Morris always said that ground would do in a decent year.

I finished the last row a little before one o’clock.

I sat there at the end of the field with the header raised and the engine running and looked across the gravel at Truman’s forty, still standing.

Rain by tonight. An inch or more.

I thought about it for maybe ten seconds. Then I folded the unloading auger in, put the combine in road gear, and turned out of my field and onto the gravel.

Ethan followed me with the cart. He did not ask where we were going.

Truman was standing at the end of his forty when I came over the little rise. I don’t know how long he had been out there.