The Keys He Threw Into The Beans

I lowered the header into Truman’s beans at one fifteen on a Sunday afternoon, with the clouds starting to stack up in the west.

His beans were better than mine. They always were, on that forty. It is higher ground and better drained, and the monitor stayed near sixty bushels an acre on most passes.

Ethan ran the cart back and forth to the road where Truman had the semi parked, and the load grew.

Around three, Mabel’s car came down the gravel and pulled onto the shoulder behind Truman’s semi.

She got out, and Henry got out of the passenger side, and Truman walked over to her, and they stood there by the car for a long time.

I could not hear them. I was a quarter mile away in the combine.

I could just see Truman with his head down, and his mother standing very straight in her church coat, and then I saw her put her hand flat on his chest.

It was the way you hold a child who is crying, when you want them to stop shaking.

She did not hug him. Mabel is not a hugger. But she kept her hand there a long time.

When I came around to that end of the field, Henry was waiting at the field edge, waving both arms at me, and I stopped and opened the door and let him climb the ladder into the cab.

“Grandma said I could ride,” he said.

“Did she.”

“Is this Uncle Truman’s field?”

“It is.”

He thought about that, sitting on the armrest the way Morris used to set him, his sneakers swinging. “How come we’re cutting it?”

I took a long time answering. The header ate its way down the row, and the beans poured into the hopper behind us with that sound like rain on a tin roof.

“Because he needed help,” I said. “And your dad would have.”

Henry nodded like that was a whole answer, because to a ten-year-old it is.

On the next pass, I let him steer. He held the wheel with both hands, his tongue between his teeth, while I sat back with my hand just behind his. The rows went by slow and straight.

We finished Truman’s forty at twenty minutes after five. The first raindrops hit the windshield as I was pulling the combine back onto the gravel.

By the time I got to my own yard it was coming down steady, the cold kind, and it rained an inch and a half before morning.

Truman’s beans were all in. A little over twenty-three hundred bushels. He hauled the last load to Latimer that evening with the wipers going.

I was standing in the machine shed door watching the rain when Truman’s pickup pulled into the yard.

He got out and walked over to me, and he stood in the rain in front of the shed, not coming in.

“I told Nina,” he said. “All of it.”

“How’d it go?”

“She cried. Then she yelled. Then she cried again.” He shook his head. “Then she said she’d been wondering for a year what was wrong with me, and she was glad to finally know.”

“That sounds like Nina.”

He looked past me into the shed. The bucket Morris had been sitting on was still there by the workbench. I had not been able to move it.