We finished planting the eighty on Monday.
Luke came across the road at daylight without being asked. He ran the tractor. I ran the seed tender. Abby rode in the buddy seat in her father’s cap.
Around four o’clock, Scott walked across the road with a box of donuts from the gas station in Blue Hill. He stood at the end of my field eating a long john, watching the last passes. Like a man watching a ball game.
Across the road, Randy was planting their last field on the north end himself.
We both ran late. The light was going. The sky over the Wiebe barn went orange, then pink, then purple. The meadowlarks quit singing for the night.
Luke flipped on the tractor lights.
Across the road, I saw Randy’s lights come on too.
I stood at the edge of my field with the last empty seed bag folded under my arm.
Abby climbed down out of the cab. She came and stood next to me. She leaned her head against my side.
And we watched.
On our side of the road, Luke was running the last rows, the planter lights swinging slowly around at the end of each pass. On the other side, Randy’s lights were doing the same thing. Back and forth. Back and forth. Across Jeff’s ground.
“Count the passes,” I said.
Abby reached up and held the green cap on with one hand. Even though there wasn’t any wind.
And we stood there together at dusk and watched two sets of planter lights moving back and forth, on either side of the gravel road.
It rained in July.
Not a lot. But enough. Two good soaking rains, one on the Fourth and one the week after. Everybody at church said it was the best July in three years. I didn’t tell anybody I’d been lying awake every night of June, listening for thunder, knowing I didn’t have one dollar of crop insurance on that eighty.
The corn came up even. Number six row and all.
That October, Luke brought the partnership’s combine across the road on a Tuesday morning. Randy rode over with him in the pickup.
I’d written out a check for the custom rate. Forty-two dollars an acre. The same rate the custom harvesters from Superior charged. $3,360.
I held it out to Randy.
He looked at it for a long time.
Then he took it. He folded it in half and put it in the front pocket of his chore coat.
“Jeff would have argued for an hour,” he said.
“I know,” I said. “But you’d have bought him supper.”
That night, Randy and Lori took Abby and me to the steakhouse in Hastings. Randy paid. He wouldn’t let me even see the bill.
The Wiebe eighty made a hundred and forty-one bushels an acre. Dryland. Planted late, thin, by a widow and a twelve-year-old and a kid fresh out of college.
Kyle Hoffman at the bank shook my hand when I brought in the grain check.
“Mrs. Engel,” he said. “I’ll be honest. I didn’t think you’d make it.”
“Neither did anybody else, Kyle,” I said.
I paid off the tractor note I’d taken out in June to cover fertilizer. I bought crop insurance for next year on the very first day of sign-up. And I put $5,000 into a savings account at the credit union in Abby’s name.
I wrote “For the Wiebe eighty” on the deposit slip.
On her eighteenth birthday, I’m going to hand her the deed. The way her daddy always said he would, if he ever won the lottery.
The pantry door trim is hanging in our hallway now. Right inside the front door of the little white farmhouse. Luke came over one Saturday and helped me put it up, with new nails, level and straight.
Last November, on her thirteenth birthday, Abby stood against it in her socks.
I put a book flat on top of her head. I took out Jeff’s carpenter’s pencil, the flat orange one I found in his shop apron.
And I made the thirteenth mark.
“Abby, 13,” I wrote. “Wiebe place.”
She stepped away from the wall and looked at it. Then she looked out the front window, across the gravel road, at her daddy’s fields. Bare now, and brown, waiting for spring.
“Next year,” she said, “I want to run the end rows.”
“You’ll have to reach the pedals first,” I said.
She stood up as tall as she could. Then she reached for the green cap on the hook by our back door. Our hook now. Our door.
She put it on. It still came down over her ears.
But not quite as far as it used to.
THE END..!
