I said, “All right,” and hung up, and I stood in the yard with the wind starting to pick up, and I said out loud, “Lord, You know what I need. Send me my son.”
Then I went and got in the grain truck.
It is a 1994 International with a ten-ton bed and a gearshift as long as my forearm, and I have been driving it since I was twenty-four. The elevator stayed open late for us because Ambrose, who ran the scale, said he would sit up all night if that was what it took. He did, too. He had a thermos and a lawn chair and a flashlight. I hauled from nine in the evening until after midnight, and my knees ached and I did not stop. Every truck ahead of me at the scale was a neighbor’s. The whole county, it seemed, had come out into the dark to save a widow’s wheat.
On the fourth trip I was alone on the county road with the headlights on the gravel and the first lightning showing in the west. I was also praying, and I do not know what to call that prayer except desperate. I said, Lord, I have never once asked You for anything this plainly. I need a hand. I need someone out there in that field who knows what to do. Send somebody. Send my son.
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And the two-way radio on the dash crackled.
We had the same cheap radio in the truck and the combine, and we had used them all harvest to call the loads. Dorene’s voice came across the speaker flat and calm and a little bit fond, the voice of someone who has done this ten thousand times.
“Truck two, this is the combine. Mama, you copy?”
I picked up the handset. “I copy.”
“I’m full. Come on back and I’ll keep her moving. We’ve got maybe two hours before it hits. I think we get most of it.”
“All right,” I said.
“Mama?” she said. “You’re doing great. Drive safe.”
I put the handset back on its hook, and I sat there with the engine idling, and something went through me that I did not have a name for.
I was a woman praying for help. And the help was on the radio, telling me to drive safe.
The hail hit at twenty minutes to midnight. Between them, Dorene’s combine and the three neighbors’ machines running with their headlights on the rows had cut six hundred acres of the six hundred and forty by then. When the first gusts hit, the men pulled off toward their trucks, and Dorene took the last pass alone at a pace I would not have believed from a woman who had been on that seat for sixteen hours. The wind turned cold. The first stones were pea-sized, and then they were marbles. I was in the yard with the last load tarped when I saw her climb down from the cab and stand with her face turned up while the stones came down, and I thought, she has lost her mind.
Now I know what she was doing. She was saying thank you.
The storm took the last forty acres and flattened them. It took the garden and a window out of the machine shed. It did not take one bushel that was already off the field. Men in town said afterward it was the quickest cutting anyone had seen on the east side in thirty years, and the credit went to a woman in a canvas coat who had not been to bed.