The Pivot Gears He Never Changed

Last winter Russ told me the wheel gearboxes were shot. All fourteen of them, two on every tower, one at each tire.

He said water had been getting past the seals for years and he could not keep patching them.

“You’ll lose the whole system some July if you don’t,” he said, standing in my kitchen with his cap in his hands. “I’ll do them this winter while it’s slow. Parts and a little labor. I’ll give you family price.”

The bill came in February. Fourteen wheel gearboxes at seven hundred sixty dollars each, ten thousand six hundred forty, plus seven hundred sixty for labor, which he said was one box worth of his time for the whole job. Eleven thousand four hundred dollars.

I paid it in two checks. One came out of what I had saved from flagging the summer before.

The other came off the operating line at the bank, which meant I would be paying interest on those gearboxes until the corn was sold.

I never saw him do the work. I was on the county truck most days, even in winter, running salt and filling potholes, and Eli was in his first year of ag mechanics classes at the community college in Hastings.

Russ said he came out on the frozen days when his truck would not sink.

When I drove past in March, the gearboxes all had fresh silver paint on them. They looked good. They looked new.

I remember feeling grateful, and feeling a little guilty that I had ever thought the bill was steep.

So that Monday in July, with tower five crooked and the panel blinking, I did what I had done for eight years.

I believed him. I called the county and told them I would be late, and I went home to make coffee and think.

Eli was at the kitchen table in a red T-shirt eating cereal out of a mixing bowl, the way he has since he was fourteen.

He had come home for the summer to help me and to work part time at the implement dealer in town.

“Russ says it’s the motor on five,” I said. “He says he can’t come for a week. Maybe ten days.”

Eli set his spoon down. “A week at tassel? Mom, that’s a lot of bushels. You can’t wait a week. Let me go look at it. I can at least tell you if the motor’s running.”

“He said not to touch the wheel boxes. He said we’d mess up his seals.”

“I’m not going to touch the seals,” Eli said. “I’m going to look at a motor. Come on. I’ll bring the meter and the big tool bag. You can hold the flashlight like you always do and tell me I’m doing it wrong.”

That made me laugh, which I needed. We loaded the four-wheeler and drove out the field road along the edge of the corn, and by eight o’clock it was already near ninety degrees with no wind at all.

Before we did anything, Eli walked back to the pivot point and shut the main disconnect and put my padlock on it. Russ taught him that, too.

You never put your hands on a pivot that can move, he used to say, and you never trust somebody else to keep the power off for you.

We drove the wheel track out to tower five. The corn was taller than Eli, which is saying something, because he is six foot three.

Under the tower it smelled like hot dirt and leaves and the gear oil that always weeps a little around a wheel box.