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By Root 952 0

every day after that, Ty took the portable moisture tester out into the fields, hoping against hope that with good weather he could start harvesting early. When he came back, he and Jess, with whom he’d made up his mind he had to work, drove the two combines, the big three-year-old six-row picker and the old two-row picker that Daddy had bought used five years earlier, already with four thousand hours on it. There was also the old cornpicker, still sitting in Daddy’s barn, that took whole ears instead of shelled grain like the combines. Using the cornpicker would mean more storage, since there were two slatted corncribs at the east edge of Mel’s corner, right on Cabot Street Road, but Ty didn’t like to use it because it wasn’t designed for long modern ears, and tended to shell the biggest ears and leave the corn in the field. “Nice for the birds,” said Ty. I didn’t like to use it because it seemed to me, the way things were going, there was bound to be an accident. Accidents were more frequent with cornpickers than combines, and more horrible, too. One day, I saw them hitch it to the tractor and pull it out into the sunshine to have a look at it. Even from that distance (I was standing at the window in our room and looking down the road), it looked menacing.

We heard people did turn out to help Loren and Harold, including Lyman Livingstone, who put off his departure for Florida by two weeks, and two of the Stanley boys, but we were so busy it was easy not to think about that, and even easier not to mention it. Dollie asked Rose one day in Casey’s how Daddy liked it in Des Moines. Rose said, “Better than he thought he would,” and smiled her cheeriest smile.

The court date was set for October 19, more than a month away. Mr. Cartier told Rose that since Pete was only involved by marriage, his death didn’t affect the legal status of the suit.

I continued to behave as if I were living in the sight of all our neighbors, as Mr. Cartier had told us to. I waited for Rose to die, but the weather was warm for sauerkraut and liver sausage—that was a winter dish.

Around the eighteenth, Ty said he thought he might try harvesting some of the corn. An early season variety planted in our southwest corner was down to 19 percent moisture and there was rain predicted for the next day, which would raise the moisture levels and delay harvest for two days or even three. He said, “There’s sixty-two acres over there. If we run both combines, we can pick most of that.”

I smiled. No doubt about it, no matter what, beginning the harvest was exciting. He smiled back at me. I said, “You want Rose and me?”

“We’ll see what the lines at the elevator are like. Crop report was pretty good before you got up. Corn was up to $2.45, and if the weather is wet for the next three days it could go up another nickel. We’ll see. We’ll see.”

He practically leapt from the table then, as if anticipation were a spring in him that had finally overpowered his natural caution.

I finished the dishes, swept the floor, wiped the counter, cleaned the seams in the counter with a toothpick, scoured the drip pans and burner grates, applied the toothpick to the assorted corners of the stove, and cleaned the oven door with Windex. These activities coalesced into a kind of waking dream that was punctuated by the rumble of the combines passing on the west side of the house. There was a track that led to that southwest corner, skirting the little dump. Jess would be driving one of the combines. I wondered what he would think as he passed, then bent down and began to scrape dirt out of the little round feet that supported the front of the stove. Sometime later, the truck, with the grain wagon attached, thundered and rattled by, as well.

The harvest drama commenced then, with the usual crises and heroics. Men against nature, men against machine, men against the swirling, impersonal forces of the market. Victories—finishing the last of a field just before a rain—and defeats—the price of corn dropping thirty cents a bushel in a single day; the strange transforming mix of power and