“Mabel, that’s your retirement.”
“I’m seventy-three. My house is paid for. I’ve got Walt’s pension and Social Security. I don’t need it sitting in a bank.” Her chin came up. “But I’m not giving it to him. I’m lending it. Walter Brekke’s drawing up the note right now. He’ll pay me back two hundred dollars a month, starting in January, for as long as it takes.”
“That’s twenty-six years, Mabel.”
“Then I’d better live to be ninety-nine,” she said. “Morris knew how to do it right. I’m just copying him.”
The next week, Truman came to my house.
He came on a Sunday afternoon, after church, in a clean flannel shirt with his hair combed. He stood on my porch holding his seed cap.
Henry answered the door. He looked up at his uncle without smiling.
“Hi, Uncle Truman.”
“Hey, Hank.” Truman’s voice was rough. “Is your mom home?”
“She’s in the kitchen.”
“Can I talk to her?”
Henry looked over his shoulder at me. I nodded. He stepped aside, but he didn’t leave. He stood in the living room doorway with his arms crossed, watching, the way Morris used to watch a salesman.
Truman stood in my kitchen and didn’t sit down.
“I came to apologize,” he said. “To both of you. Henry, I did something really bad to your mom. I threw her keys into the beans so she couldn’t finish harvest. I was trying to make her sell me your dad’s ground. That was wrong. It’s your ground. It’s always going to be your ground.”
Henry didn’t say anything. His jaw was tight.
“Your dad would’ve been ashamed of me,” Truman said, and his voice broke. “I’m ashamed of me.”
He reached into his shirt pocket and took out a folded check. He set it on the kitchen table in front of me.
It was for $4,000, drawn on his checking account at Hampton State Bank. Payable to the Estate of Morris Lindqvist. In the memo line, in his cramped handwriting: First payment on M’s note.
“That’s all the money I had left after the beans,” he said. “It leaves fourteen thousand. I’ll pay the rest by next December. Like the note says.”
I looked at the check for a long time.
“I could forgive it,” I said. “The note. Walter says I’m the executor. I can just tear it up.”
“Please don’t,” Truman said quietly. “Morris typed it up so I wouldn’t feel like a charity case. I’d like to pay it off. All of it. For him.”
I picked up the check and folded it carefully.
“Okay,” I said. “I’ll deposit it into the estate account tomorrow.”
Truman let out a long breath.
Then Henry spoke from the doorway.
“Uncle Truman.”
Truman turned.
“Did my dad really say he’d cut your beans?”
“Yeah, Hank. He did. In August. We shook on it.”
Henry thought about that very seriously, the way he thinks about math problems.
“Then Mom kept his promise,” he said.
Truman’s face crumpled. He nodded, unable to speak.
“Next year,” Henry said, “can you teach me how to drive the grain cart?”
Truman looked at me over Henry’s head. His eyes were wet.
“If your mom says it’s okay,” he said.
I thought about it for a long moment.
“He’s ten,” I said. “He can ride along with you. He doesn’t drive till he’s twelve. And you’re wearing a seat belt, Henry.”
“Deal,” said Henry.
That winter, I sat down with Walter Brekke and made my will.
The home eighty goes into a trust for Henry when I die. Don Halverson’s son, Greg, a CPA in Mason City, is the trustee, at Don’s insistence. Mabel is named as Henry’s guardian if anything happens to me before he turns eighteen, with Barb and Don as backup.
Truman isn’t named anywhere in it. Not yet.
“Someday maybe,” I told Walter. “Not yet.”
“That seems right,” he said.
I also paid him $650 to draw up a custom harvesting agreement, the first written agreement I’ve ever had with anybody to cut their crops. Starting the next fall, I’d harvest Truman’s forty with Morris’s combine at the going custom rate: $38 an acre for soybeans, $42 for corn. That’s $1,520 a year for beans. He’d pay it out of his grain check, the same way everybody else around here does.
“You’re charging him?” Mabel asked when I told her.
“Morris would have,” I said. “He’d have charged him the neighbor rate, a few dollars under. And Truman would have paid it, so he wouldn’t feel like a charity case.”
Mabel laughed, really laughed, for the first time since the funeral.
“You’re right,” she said. “That’s exactly what Morris would’ve done.”
The Kruse brothers lost about a fifth of their beans to the rain that week. They’d quit their own harvest to come look for my keys. Every bushel they lost was on my account, as far as I was concerned.
In November, after harvest was done, I wrote them a check for $3,800. The Kruses tore it up in front of me at the co-op, in front of half the town.
“You’ll get us back,” Lyle said. “Next time one of us is down, you show up with a flashlight. That’s how it works out here.”
So I did something else. I called the eleven people who had walked my bean field in the dark, plus Ethan, and invited every one of them, with their families, to a supper at the Lutheran church hall in December.
I bought the ham. Mabel made scalloped potatoes, enough for forty. Barb made her famous rhubarb pie. Pastor Ingrid brought the hotdish she’d promised. Marlys Fenske brought tomatoes she’d canned from Morris’s old garden plot, which I hadn’t even known she’d been tending.
Truman came. He stood at the back of the hall in his clean flannel shirt, holding a paper cup of coffee, looking like he wanted to disappear.
Then Don Halverson walked over to him, set a hand on his shoulder, and steered him to a seat at the end of a long table.
“Sit,” Don said. “Eat. You’re family.”
After supper, I stood up at the front of the church hall and tapped a spoon against my coffee cup.
I’m not a speechmaker. I’d written a few lines on a three-by-five card, but my hands were shaking too much to read them, so I put the card in my pocket.
“Most of you know what happened in October,” I said. “I’m not going to tell it again. I just want to say thank you. Eleven of you walked eighty acres of beans in the dark, looking for one key ring, the day before a rainstorm. Some of you left your own crops standing to do it. Barb found it.” Everybody laughed. “But all of you looked.”
I took a breath.
“Morris used to say farming isn’t a job. It’s a promise. To the land, to your family, to your neighbors. You make it every spring when you plant, and you keep it every fall when you harvest.” My voice cracked. “He made a lot of promises. I didn’t know about all of them. But I found out that night that he made one to all of you too. And every one of you kept it for him.”
Nobody said anything. Barb was crying into a napkin. Don was staring hard at his coffee.
Then Truman stood up at the end of the long table.
The whole hall went quiet.
“I’d like to say something too,” he said hoarsely. “If that’s all right.”
I nodded.
“I’m the one who threw the keys,” Truman said. “Everybody here knows it. I’ve been hiding from all of you for two months because I was ashamed. I was in trouble with money. A man from Des Moines offered me a way out. I tried to take Morris’s ground away from his son.” His voice broke. “And when Anna said no, I threw her keys into a field.”
The hall was dead silent.
“And the next day,” Truman said, “she cut my beans. Before the rain. With the same combine.”
He looked across the room at me. His eyes were streaming.
“My brother was the best man I ever knew. I spent my whole life jealous of him. And I just found out he spent the last year of his life quietly trying to save me, and asked everybody not to tell me.” He took a shaky breath. “I can’t pay any of you back for what you did that night. But I’m going to try to be the kind of neighbor who shows up with a flashlight.”
He sat down.
For a long moment nobody moved.
Then Lyle Kruse stood up, walked down the long table, and held out his hand. Truman stared at it, then shook it. Then Dennis Kruse. Then Gary Schuler. Then Pastor Ingrid, who hugged him so hard his coffee spilled.
Mabel sat beside me with her hand over her mouth, tears running down her cheeks.
“Morris would’ve liked this,” she whispered.
“Yes,” I said. “He would.”
That was a year ago.
This October, I cut the home eighty again, all of it, beans on the west half and corn on the east. Ethan drove the grain cart. He’s a senior now, applying to Iowa State to study agronomy. I wrote him a recommendation letter. In it I said he once sat in a tractor with the auger out while a grown man threw my keys into a field, and then he walked the rows with a flashlight until dark. I said that tells you everything you need to know about Ethan Schuler.
Truman paid off the rest of Morris’s note last month, two months early. Fourteen thousand dollars, in seven checks of $2,000 each, made out to the Estate of Morris Lindqvist. Walter Brekke closed the estate the following week.
Truman’s paying Mabel back too, two hundred dollars a month, every month, on the first. She keeps the receipts in a coffee can on top of her refrigerator, labeled TRUMAN in her careful handwriting.
He sold his pickup and bought an older one. He quit going to the bar in Hampton on Friday nights. He goes to Our Savior’s on Sundays now and sits in the back pew with his mother.
He hasn’t remarried. He says he’s not ready. But Barb Halverson has been trying to set him up with her niece from Clarion, and I’ve seen him blush when her name comes up.
This fall, I cut Truman’s forty the day after I finished mine, like we agreed. It was all in writing, at the neighbor rate, $35 an acre.
And Henry rode in the grain cart with his uncle.
I watched them from the combine cab, the red tractor and the yellow cart bouncing along the field road, Truman driving, Henry sitting beside him on the buddy seat with his seat belt buckled. Every time Truman pulled up alongside the combine to take a load, Henry leaned out the window and waved at me. Every single time.
On the last pass, as the sun went down orange over the bean stubble, my radio crackled.
“Mom?”
It was Henry, on Truman’s handheld radio.
“Go ahead, Hank.”
“Uncle Truman says Dad used to let me steer the combine. Sitting on the armrest. Is that true?”
My throat closed. I keyed the radio.
“It’s true,” I said. “You called it flying the green ship.”
There was a long pause.
“Can I fly it again sometime?”
I looked out across the field at the yellow cart, at my son leaning out the window, and at my brother-in-law beside him with his big hand on the boy’s shoulder.
“Tomorrow,” I said. “When we do Don’s corn. You can sit on the armrest.”
“Promise?”
I thought about Morris. About a key ring with a brass tag that said MY DAD, lying in the dirt between the bean rows. About eleven flashlights coming through the dark.
“I promise,” I said. “And out here, we keep our promises.”
Then I raised the header, turned the green combine toward home, and drove it down the field road in the last light, with the grain cart following close behind.
THE END..!
