The Harvest Her Neighbors Brought In

I was four days a widow and still hadn’t learned how to say it out loud. Walt. Dead. The two words sat in my mouth like stones every time I tried them, so mostly I just didn’t try.

I was standing at the kitchen window with a legal pad and a pencil, doing arithmetic I never wanted to learn, when I heard the first engine on the road.

Six hundred acres of soybeans were standing out there past the shelterbelt, full and dry and ready, and I did not have one single idea how I was going to bring them in.

Walt had gone down in the machine shed on a Tuesday morning, between the grease gun and the header cart, getting the combine ready for a harvest he would never run. Dr. Aldous at the clinic in town called it his heart, said it was fast and it was quiet, said there was nothing anybody could have done different, not me, not the ambulance, not anybody. I have turned that sentence over more times than I can count and I still do not know if it comforts me or just exhausts me.

We buried him on a Saturday. Pastor Ferris preached on the parable of the sower, which I thought was either the cruelest or the kindest text he could have chosen, because Walt had been exactly that, a man who put seed in ground his whole life and trusted what came up. The church basement ladies put out ham sandwiches and three kinds of bars. People I hadn’t seen since our twenty fifth anniversary hugged my neck and said he was a good man, and he was, and I nodded until my face hurt from nodding.

Then everybody went home, and the beans were still out there.

I am fifty four years old. I have run this farm’s books since the year we were married, I have hauled parts forty miles on a Sunday, I have fed harvest crews and nursed sick calves and sat up all night with a colicky horse, but I have never once in my life sat in the driver’s seat of a combine and brought it down a field. That was Walt’s seat. It never once occurred to either of us that it needed to be anybody else’s.

So on the Wednesday after the funeral I called a custom harvesting outfit out of Jamestown, a decent outfit, the Pruitt brothers, and the younger one did the math for me over the phone, kind as he could make it. $32 an acre, he said, cutting and hauling both. Six hundred acres. Over $19,000, and that was before I even knew if they had an open week, because every custom crew in three counties was already running flat out trying to beat the same rain everybody was watching on the radar.