Truman leaned into the open cab of my combine, came out holding the key ring, and threw it high and hard into the standing soybeans.
I watched it go. The keys flashed once in the October sun, turning over and over, and dropped somewhere out in the rows west of the third terrace. Twelve acres of beans, waist-high and brittle, rattling in the wind.
Nobody said a word.
Ethan, my seventeen-year-old grain cart driver, sat frozen in the tractor with the auger still swung out. He looked down at his boots.
My brother-in-law stood at the edge of the field with a folded set of papers in his other hand and a strange, tight look on his face.
“Now you’ll have time to think about it,” Truman said.
Then he got in his pickup and drove off down the field road, gravel spitting from his tires.
I stood beside the combine header in my gray hoodie and leather work gloves, my hands full of the bean vines I’d just pulled off the reel. The sky to the west was clear and blue, but the radio had been saying since Thursday that rain was coming Sunday night, two inches of it, maybe more. Then a week of wet.
Three weeks earlier, I’d buried my husband.
My name is Anna Lindqvist. I’m thirty-seven years old. I farm two hundred and forty acres outside Hampton, Iowa, in Franklin County. Until the last week of September, I farmed it with my husband, Morris.
Morris was thirty-nine when his heart quit in the machine shed.
He’d gone out after supper to grease the combine for harvest. When he didn’t come in by nine, I went out with a flashlight. He was lying on the concrete beside the left front tire with a grease gun still in his hand. The doctor in Mason City said it was an arrhythmia, a problem with the electrical system of his heart that nobody had ever caught. “There was nothing you could have done,” he told me. People keep saying that, as if it helps.
Our son, Henry, is ten. Morris used to set him on the armrest of the combine and let him steer down the long rows, Morris’s big hand over Henry’s small one on the joystick. Henry called it “flying the green ship.”
He hasn’t asked to ride in it since the funeral.
That Saturday morning, I had twelve acres of beans left to cut on the home eighty, the eighty acres around our house that Morris’s great-grandfather had broken in 1911. Then I’d be done with beans for the year. I’d started at seven, as soon as the dew lifted. Ethan was running the grain cart, hauling from the combine to the semi at the end of the field. We’d been making good time.
Then, around eleven, the header clogged with a wad of tough green vines from a wet spot near the waterway. I shut down the separator, climbed down, and started pulling vines off the reel by hand.
That’s when Truman came up the field road too fast.
Truman Lindqvist is Morris’s older brother. He’s forty-one, tall and rawboned, with the same pale blue eyes as Morris and none of the gentleness. He farms forty acres across the gravel road from us, the forty his father left him, and he works part-time driving a feed truck for the co-op in Hampton.
He climbed out of his pickup holding papers, and he didn’t bother with hello.
“Sign it, Anna,” he said, holding them out. “Six thousand an acre. It keeps the eighty in the family.”
I didn’t take the papers.
Six thousand an acre for the home eighty came to $480,000. The going rate for good Franklin County ground that fall was closer to eleven thousand an acre. The auction down the road in September had brought $11,400. The eighty was worth nearly $900,000.
“I told you no on Tuesday, Truman,” I said. “And I told you no at the funeral lunch. It’s Henry’s ground.”
“Henry’s ten.”
“He won’t always be.”
“You can’t run this place by yourself, Anna. Everybody knows it. You’re going to lose it to the bank inside two years, and then some outfit from Des Moines buys it and it’s gone. This way it stays a Lindqvist farm.”
“It is a Lindqvist farm. Henry’s a Lindqvist.”
His jaw worked. He looked at the combine, the green John Deere S670 that Morris had bought used four years ago and babied like a racehorse. He looked at Ethan, sitting in the cart tractor. He looked at the sky.
“You’ve got twelve acres left,” he said. “Rain Sunday night. You need to think about what you’re doing.”
“I’m cutting beans,” I said. “That’s what I’m doing.”
That was when he leaned into the cab.
When I think about it now, I don’t remember being angry. I remember being very, very still, like a deer in a ditch. Ethan told me afterward that I didn’t move for almost a full minute after Truman’s pickup turned onto the gravel.
Then I took off one work glove and stood there thinking it through, the way Morris taught me to think through a breakdown. What’s broken. What can I fix. What can’t I.
Calling the sheriff wouldn’t find one key ring in eighty acres of soybeans. And it was Truman. Morris’s brother. Mabel’s son. Henry’s uncle.
The John Deere dealer in Hampton closes at noon on Saturdays. It was 11:20. Even if they had a spare key, which I doubted, there was no way to get one programmed and out to me before Monday. By Monday, two inches of rain would be lying on those beans.
Twelve acres of soybeans that had yielded about sixty bushels an acre in the rest of the field was seven hundred and twenty bushels. At $10.20 a bushel at the elevator that week, that was $7,344. And if they got rained on and sat in the field for a week, the beans would shatter, the pods would split, and the beans would fall on the ground. I could lose a third of it, maybe more.
Seven thousand dollars was the November payment on the operating loan Morris had taken out in March at Hampton State Bank. It was the money for Henry’s winter coat and boots. It was the propane for the house.
I didn’t cry. I thought about crying, distantly, the way you think about rain that’s still two counties away.
I pulled out my phone and called Don Halverson.
Don is seventy. He and his wife, Barb, have farmed the quarter section across the road from us for my whole married life. Don is short and barrel-chested, with hands like baseball mitts and a seed corn cap he’s worn so long the bill has gone soft. When Morris and I were first married and didn’t know anything, Don was the one who showed Morris how to set a planter and showed me how to read a grain moisture tester.
He answered on the second ring.
“Anna.”
“Don. Truman threw the combine keys into the beans.”
There was a pause about two seconds long.
“Where’d they land?”
Not what happened, or why, or is he crazy. Just where did they land.
“West of the third terrace, I think. Maybe a hundred yards in. Maybe more.”
“Stay put,” Don said. “Don’t go wading around in there and trampling things. I’ll make some calls.”
He hung up.
I climbed back up onto the combine step and sat down. Ethan climbed down from the cart tractor and came over slowly, hands in his pockets.
“Mrs. Lindqvist, I’m sorry. I should’ve done something.”
“Like what, Ethan?”
“I don’t know. Grabbed his arm.”
“He’s six-three and he’s my brother-in-law. You did fine.”
He kicked at the dirt. “My dad says Truman’s been weird since August.”
“Weird how?”
Ethan looked uncomfortable. “Just weird. Selling stuff. He sold his four-wheeler. My dad saw it on Facebook Marketplace.”
I filed that away.
Then I called Mabel.
Mabel Lindqvist is Morris and Truman’s mother. She’s seventy-three, a small, upright widow who lives in a white bungalow in Hampton with a tidy garden and a cat named Pastor. Henry was supposed to be at a friend’s birthday party until four, and I’d planned to pick him up after we finished the beans.
“Mabel, could you pick Henry up from the Petersons’ party and keep him tonight? Something’s come up at the farm.”
She didn’t ask what. There was a short pause, and then her voice came back low and tired.
“Which son did it?” she asked.
I closed my eyes.
“The one who’s still alive, Mabel.”
“I’ll get Henry,” she said. “Don’t you worry about him. I’ll make him meatloaf.”
She hung up. She didn’t ask what Truman had done. I think she already knew it was something.
Don pulled into the field at one-thirty in his old white Chevy pickup, Barb beside him. Behind them came a red Ford, and behind that, two more trucks.
By three, there were six people. By five, there were nine. By dusk, there were eleven of them. Ethan made twelve.
They wore orange jackets and blue ones, seed caps and stocking hats. Every one of them carried a flashlight, even in the daylight, because Don had told them they’d still be at it after dark.
There was Don and Barb. Ethan’s dad, Gary Schuler, who farms near Geneva. The Kruse brothers, Lyle and Dennis, who’d quit cutting their own beans two miles east to come. Their beans were standing in the same forecast I was, and they came anyway. There was Pastor Ingrid Holm from Our Savior’s Lutheran, in jeans and a Hampton-Dumont Bulldogs sweatshirt. Marlys Fenske, a retired schoolteacher who’d taught Morris in fourth grade. Two young guys from the co-op who worked with Truman. And Rick Anderberg, the crop insurance agent, who’d driven out in his town shoes and immediately ruined them.
Don lined them up along the west edge of the third terrace, one person per bean row, about thirty inches apart.
“Nice and slow,” he said. “Bend over. Look at the ground, not the plants. Keys are heavy. They’ll be on the dirt. Don’t stomp. These are Anna’s beans.”
They started walking west, bent over, moving at the speed of a slow funeral procession.
I couldn’t search. Every time I stepped into the beans, my hands started shaking, and Don sent me back to the combine.
“You hold the light for us,” he said. “We’ll need something to aim at when it gets dark.”
So I stood on the step of the green combine in my gray hoodie and gloves and held a big spotlight on the cab, so they’d have a landmark.
The sun went down at 6:22. The sky turned orange, then pink, then the deep blue of an Iowa October. The line of flashlights moved slowly west through the beans, eleven yellow circles bobbing in the dark, then turned and came back east one row over. Then west again.
Around seven, Barb came back to the combine with a thermos of coffee and two ham sandwiches wrapped in wax paper.
“Eat,” she said.
“I can’t.”
“You can. You haven’t had anything since breakfast. I can tell by looking at you.”
I ate half a sandwich standing on the combine step. Barb stood beside me, watching the lights move through the field.
“Don’s mad,” she said quietly.
“At Truman?”
“At himself. He’s been watching Truman fall apart since spring and didn’t say anything to you. He didn’t think it was his place, with Morris gone.” She sipped her coffee. “Now he thinks it was.”
“What do you mean, fall apart?”
Barb looked at me for a long moment. Then she shook her head.
“That’s Don’s to tell. Or Truman’s.”
At 7:48, just after full dark, a voice came up out of the rows.
“Got ’em!”
It was Barb. She’d gone back out in the last pass. She stood up in the middle of the beans about a hundred and forty yards in and held the key ring over her head like a prize walleye.
Eleven flashlight beams swung toward her at once.
