Rod Ehrlich read the signature at the bottom of the page three times, slowly, with his thumb moving under the line. I have watched that man read a tractor contract. He reads it the way some men read scripture, expecting to be saved by a clause. When he finished he looked up, and the red had gone out of his big face, and the Ferris wheel lights outside turned the barn doorway gold. “Thirteen million, four hundred thousand dollars,” he said. He said it softly, as if the number were an animal he did not want to startle. “Darla. You sold all of it. The whole company.” I told him I had in June. Every one of my forty five people had kept a job.
The barn was so quiet that I could hear a steer shift in its straw. Brenda had come around the show box and was standing at the elbow of her husband, a small woman in a blue sundress with her hand on her throat. She is my baby sister, and I have loved her since the day I carried her home from school on my back. “Darla,” she said. “You never told me.” “I was going to tell you at Christmas,” I said. “I wanted to buy you a house.” Her face crumpled. “Oh, Darla,” she said. “I let him hand you a pitchfork.” She looked at the pitchfork against the stall, and began, quietly, to weep.
Cody climbed down from the hay bale and crossed the straw to me. He is a lean, sunburned young man of thirty two, with the hands of my father and the stubborn chin of my father, and I have taught him everything I know about reading wheat. “Aunt Darla,” he said. “I took the combine. I am not going to lie.” His voice was steady, which surprised me. “I was going to sell it and put it into the new company. It was the idea of my father, but I did it. I should have called you.” “You should have,” I said. “You had my number.” He looked at the straw. “I did not want to hear you say no.” I told him that was the first honest thing anyone had said all day.
A pitchfork leaned against a barn stall beside a purple ribbon and gave one wheat cutter the night to bring her nephew back to the crew.
I turned to Rod. I had saved him, because I wanted to see him without the microphone. He stood beside the steer of his grandson, holding the purple ribbon in a hand that no longer seemed to know what to do with it. “Rod,” I said, “for thirty years you have called me the harvest girl. In front of your customers. At the Christmas party. At the funeral of my father.”
His eyes jumped to mine. “I did not say a word, because my sister loves you. But I will tell you what I have thought each time. I have thought: that man has never driven a combine in a hundred and ten degree heat, at four in the morning, with a hailstorm on the horizon and forty five families depending on the next acre.”
“I have not,” Rod said. He said it so quietly that I almost missed it. He put the ribbon down on the show box, and his shoulders dropped, and he was suddenly an older man, a sixty three year old dealer in a pressed shirt who had never once, in his life, had a day he could not buy his way out of. “I envied you, Darla. You went out in a hundred acres of wheat and you came back with your name on something. I sold other men machines. I sold your machines.” He swallowed. “Every time you drove into the lot, I felt like a clerk.” The straw rustled. Nobody breathed.
I picked up the pitchfork from the stall. I had meant to say something grand with it, I will admit. A woman does not forget forty stalls. But I looked at my brother in law, standing in a barn full of neighbors with his dignity in a puddle at his feet, and I held the fork out to him by the handle. “Rod,” I said. “There is a bad corner by the back gate. It has not been done since Tuesday. I will give you twenty dollars.” A boy somewhere began to laugh, and was hushed. Rod took the pitchfork. His hand was shaking. “I will do it for nothing,” he said.
He did it. I will tell you, I did not expect that. He took off his good jacket and handed it to Brenda, and he walked to the back of the barn in his pressed trousers and his polished boots, and for twenty minutes, in front of half of Ford County, the owner of the John Deere dealership mucked a stall. Nobody laughed. They watched him in a respectful silence, the way you watch a man pay a debt. When he finished, he leaned the fork carefully against the wall, and wiped his hands on his handkerchief, and came back and put the twenty dollar bill I had earned into my palm.
The combine went home that night, on the header trailer, with Cody at the wheel and me following in my pickup. At the yard on Highway 50, Manny stood waiting under the floodlight with a clipboard. He checked the serial number by flashlight, and nodded, and signed. Cody parked the machine in its old bay, between two other greens, and sat a moment in the cab with the engine ticking. When he climbed down, he did not say anything for a long while. Then he said, “Aunt Darla, I do not want to start my own company. Not like that. I want to learn how to do it right.” I handed him the keys.
The following May, the new owners ran a ten combine crew out of Vernon, Texas, headed north, as always. I rode the lead machine with Cody, who had been made a crew chief at a wage I will not repeat. We cut the Texas wheat, then Oklahoma, then Kansas, and in June we cut a field outside Dodge City belonging to a man named Ehrlich, who asked for us by name. Rod stood at the fence in his John Deere cap, with Brenda beside him. When the combine rolled by, he took off the cap. I tipped mine. KINNEY, said the grain tank, in black letters, and nobody tried to cover it.
