The Keys He Threw Into The Beans

His pickup was parked on the shoulder, and he was standing in the field approach with his hands in his coat pockets, looking at his own beans like a man looks at a house on fire.

When he heard the combine he turned around. He saw me coming, and for a second his face did something I will not forget.

Then he stepped out into the approach with one hand up.

I stopped. I let the engine idle, and I opened the cab door, and I looked down at him.

He took off his cap. It was an old seed corn cap, the kind they hand out at field days, the bill bent from twenty years of hands.

I knew that cap. It had been Morris’s, a long time ago, before he gave it to his brother.

“Anna,” he said. “Morris knew.”

I climbed down off the combine. We stood in the field approach with the engine running behind us and Ethan idling the cart tractor at a respectful distance on the road, and Truman told me.

He owed the bank in Hampton two hundred and twelve thousand dollars on his operating note.

Two bad years in a row: hail in July of last year, then a wet spring that kept him from getting half his corn planted on time.

Seed and fertilizer and cash rent on six hundred acres, and not enough crop to cover it.

He said all of it in a flat voice, like a man reading a weather report about somebody else’s county.

“The bank was patient,” he said. “They really were. But in August they told me I had to pay it down or they couldn’t carry it another year. So I sold the combine. Got a hundred and ninety for it. Paid them a hundred and fifty.”

“And Morris said you’d use ours.”

“Morris said we’d use his.” He stopped. “Yours. He said, we’ll do the eighty, then we’ll swing over and do your forty and your rented ground, just like Dad. He said it was no big deal. He said that a lot.”

He laughed a little, and it came out wrong, and he looked away at the beans.

“I didn’t tell Nina how bad it was. I didn’t tell Mom. Morris was the only one who knew. And then he went out to grease the bean head and he just…” He stopped again. “It was like the floor went out from under me. All of it at once.”

“So you came after Henry’s ground.”

He flinched like I had hit him. I meant him to. I am not proud of that, but it is true.

“The bank said if I owned more land, they could roll the whole note into a land loan at a better rate. If I could buy the eighty at six, with it worth eleven, there’d be enough equity on paper to carry everything. I’d keep farming. You’d have the money. Henry could still walk on it.”

“Truman.”

“I know.” He looked at me then, and his eyes were wet. “I know what it was. I knew it on Tuesday, and I came back Saturday anyway, and when you said no in front of Ethan I just… I’ve never done anything like that in my life, Anna. I don’t know who that was.”

I stood there a long time. The beans rattled behind him.