The pivot quit on a Monday morning in the second week of July, right as the corn was starting to tassel, and the first thing my stepdad said about it was that it was my fault.
I had called him from the end of the field at a quarter to seven.
The control panel at the pivot point showed a safety shutdown, and from the road I could see tower five sitting crooked, a few feet behind the others.
“It’s your center drive motor on five,” Russ said, before I had finished telling him. “Probably burned it up running in the heat. You run that thing too fast, Marla. I’ve told you that for years.”
“I haven’t touched the speed setting since you set it in April,” I said. “It’s on the same percent timer it’s always been. Can you come look at it today? We’re right at tassel.”
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There was a long breath on the line, and I could hear my mother’s television in the background, a morning game show turned up loud because her hearing has gone.
“I’m booked out a week,” he said. “Maybe ten days. Don’t you go pulling on those new wheel boxes, either. You’ll mess up the seals I just put in and then you’ll want me to eat it.”
Then, a little lower, so I knew it was meant for me and not for Mom: “You never could leave a thing alone. Your mother says the same about you, you know. Always fixing what isn’t yours to fix.”
He hung up. I stood in the road ditch with the phone in my hand and the sun already hot on my neck, and I looked at a hundred and thirty acres of corn that needed water every single day.
I am forty-five years old. I farm one quarter section west of Kearney, Nebraska, that my first husband and I bought in 2008, and I run a stop and slow paddle for the county road crew five days a week in the summer to keep it.
The pivot went in the spring of 2009. Seven towers, a little under thirteen hundred feet of span, with an end gun that reaches out over the corners.
My husband and I stood out there the day the dealer’s crew raised the last span, and he kissed me right in front of them.
He died in 2016 of a heart attack at the sale barn in town, forty-one years old, leaning on a gate.
After that it was me, our boy Eli, who was ten, the pivot, the crop loan, and whatever work the county would give me.
My mother remarried in 2018. Russ Gaylor had been fixing irrigation systems around Buffalo County for thirty years, and he was good. Everybody said so.
He had a service truck with a little crane on the back and he could hear a bad gearbox from the field road.
When he married Mom, he started taking care of my pivot, and for a long time I thought that was the best thing that had happened to me since the funeral.
He charged me for parts and not much for labor. He taught Eli to turn a wrench.
That is the part I keep coming back to. He taught Eli to turn a wrench.
Eli was twelve the first time Russ let him pull a drive shaft, and he came home with grease to his elbows and a grin I had not seen on him since his dad.