The Spring Grandma Rode in My Tractor

The field was stubble when Ben drove us home from the hospital. Maisie was four days old, asleep in the car seat beside me, and I was watching her breathe instead of watching the road.

Ben slowed down on the gravel a quarter mile before Grandma’s mailbox. He did not say anything at first. He just took his foot off the gas and let the car roll, and I looked up.

“Jen,” he said. That was all.

The thirty acres of corn I had planted in May were gone. Not the end rows, not a strip along the road.

All of it, combined clean, the stalks chopped low the way my uncle Roger always ran his head.

You could see the black dirt between the rows clear back to the shelterbelt. Somebody had done a nice job. That was the part that made my stomach turn, how tidy it was.

I had planned to harvest it the week after Maisie came. Ben’s dad had promised us his combine as soon as their soybeans were out, and I had told everybody at the co-op I would be back by the twentieth.

Maisie came three weeks early instead. She came by C-section on a Thursday night in Sioux Falls, with Ben holding my hand and a nurse named Kim telling me I was doing fine when I knew I was not.

I was in that hospital four days. I held my daughter for the first time on a Thursday, and by Saturday somebody had driven a combine across my field.

“Maybe Grandma had it taken off,” Ben said. “Maybe she got worried with you laid up.”

He did not believe it. I could hear him not believing it. Ben is a careful man, and he will hand anybody the benefit of the doubt before he says a hard thing out loud.

“Grandma does not own a combine,” I said. “Roger does.”

Ben did not answer that. He pulled onto the approach by the mailbox and put the car in park, and we sat there with the engine running and the baby breathing between us.

I should tell you who everybody is, because people always get confused by the names. I was born a Holm. My dad was Tom Holm, Evelyn Holm’s younger boy, and Roger Holm is his older brother.

Then I went and married a Holm. Ben’s people are a different Holm family from three townships over, no relation at all.

In Turner County, South Dakota, you can throw a rock and hit a Holm, and most of them are Lutheran.

So when I say Grandma, I mean my dad’s mother, Evelyn, who was ninety-one that fall.

She still lived in the white farmhouse on the home place, with a girl from town coming in three mornings a week to help.

My dad farmed Grandma’s ground until his heart quit on him at fifty-eight. That was six years ago. After the funeral, Grandma sat me down and asked if I wanted to keep that thirty acres in corn.

“Your dad would like a Holm on it,” she said. “And not just any Holm.”

I knew what she meant. Roger had his own quarter a mile north, and he had been asking about her ground for years. She wanted it to go to the one who would treat it the way Tom had.