The Wheat Crop Held at the Elevator

Wayne stood at the edge of the field with his hands in his back pockets and watched the last swath of wheat fall behind my header.

It was the third of July, a Friday, a little after four in the afternoon.

The stubble ran flat and gold to the fence line, and the dust we had raised for three days was still hanging over the section road.

“Good job, boys,” he said. He said it to the field more than to me. “That’s a fine crop. I’ll see you at Thanksgiving, Nolan.”

I shut down the combine and climbed out of the cab. My knees were stiff and my ears were ringing.

Nine hundred acres in three days, two machines, three trucks, and a grain cart that Cade had pulled alongside me until his eyes went red from the chaff.

“Wayne, we need to settle up before we load out,” I said.

He turned around and looked at me the way he used to look at me when I was nine and asked him for a dollar for the county fair.

He was sixty-seven years old, and he had my father’s jaw and my father’s shoulders, and none of my father’s habits.

“Settle up,” he said. He laughed. “Family doesn’t charge family, Nolan.”

I want to be plain about what I did next, because people have asked me since. I did not yell. I did not say anything for what felt like a full minute.

Behind me the engine of the number two combine ticked as it cooled, and somewhere out in the stubble a meadowlark started up like nothing had happened.

“It’s eighteen thousand dollars,” I said. “Twenty an acre. That’s fifteen under the going rate, and I did that because you’re Dad’s brother.”

“And I appreciate it,” Wayne said. “I’ll put in a good word for you with the neighbors.” He walked to his pickup. He did not look back.

I should explain what a custom harvest crew is, because folks who have never seen one think we are a few men with a combine. We are a business that lives on the road.

Every June a few hundred crews, most of them families, load their machines on trailers in Texas and Oklahoma and start north behind the wheat.

Kansas in late June, then Nebraska, South Dakota, and the last fields in North Dakota by September. You cut what the farmer cannot cut fast enough.

If you are late to the next field, the wheat stands in the heat and loses test weight, and a farmer who has waited all year does not forgive you for it.

I run two combines, a Deere S780 and an older 9650 I rebuilt myself, plus a grain cart and three trucks.

My wife Carla drives the fuel truck and runs the books. Our son Cade is fifteen, and this was his first full season. We hire one hand each summer.

That year it was Jesse Pickett, a nineteen-year-old from Weatherford, Oklahoma, who was saving for his second year at a trade school and who had been on my payroll for three weeks.

Wayne Reimer called me in May. He had two quarters and part of a third, nine hundred acres of hard red winter wheat, outside the little town of Lyle in the middle of Kansas.

His regular cutter had retired. He said he was in a bind. He said he would rather have family than a stranger.