Chapter 9 - The Second Harvest
The autumn harvest of my seventy-third year was the finest the farm had seen in two decades.
The corn came off the bottomland at two hundred and twelve bushels to the acre—heavy, golden ears that filled the gravity wagons until the rubber tires bulged against the gravel lanes.
I operated the old John Deere 6620 combine myself.
It was hard on my bad shin—pressing the foot hydrostat for twelve hours a day made my leg swell up until Sarah had to help me pull my boot off at night—but I didn't hire the Miller boys. I didn't lease out a single acre.
Buster sat in the cab with me every single day.
He had a small wooden box lined with an old flannel shirt sitting on top of the left grain console, right next to the gear levers. Through thirty-six days of shelling corn, through sixty thousand bushels of golden grain pouring through the unloading auger, he never left that box.
When the dust got thick around the corn head, he'd turn his head away and press his scarred nose into my shirt sleeve. When the big diesel engine revved up to twenty-two hundred RPMs on the long uphill passes against the treeline, he'd lean his ribs against my hip and purr until the glass windows rattled in their rubber gaskets.
On the last Tuesday of October, we finished the north forty just as the sun was setting behind the grain silos.
The sky was a deep, fiery orange—the color of late-summer wheat, the color of an old tomcat sitting on a porch swing.
I shut off the combine engine.
The sudden silence fell over the field like a physical weight—the roar of the six-cylinder diesel dying away, replaced by the quiet rustle of dry corn leaves in the evening breeze and the distant, lonely call of a killdeer down by the creek.
I sat in the high air-conditioned cab, my hands resting on the black plastic steering wheel, looking out across two hundred and forty acres of clean, dark stubble.
Every acre was cleared. Every wagon was full. Every bin at the homestead was sealed tight against the coming cold.
I turned my head.
Buster was standing on the grain console, looking out through the front glass at the orange sky. His head was tilted five degrees to the left. His missing ear was silhouetted against the setting sun.
"We made it, buddy," I said softly, my voice quiet in the big cab.
He turned his head, looked at me through his bright yellow eyes, and gave one slow, deliberate blink.
It wasn't the look he had given me four years ago on Ellen's porch—the look that said You're a foolish old man.
It was the look old friends give each other when they've finished hauling forty tons of hay into the loft before the rain comes over the ridge—a look that says We done good, Walter. Now let's go home.
I reached out, wrapped my hand around his neck, and pulled him against my chest.
May you like
He didn't fight me. He pressed his face into the warm hollow beneath my chin, his dry tongue giving three short, rough licks against my collarbone, his purr filling the silent cab like the warm draft from a freshly stoked stove.
I reached up with my right hand, turned the brass ignition key, and started the engine back up.
