This morning, the cornfield out back is gone, nothing but stubble. Last night, in the darkness outside our windows, there was nothing but noise, and lights slowly moving all around. Our neighbor had started out back the day before, late afternoon; by eight last night it was in, all of it.
When I left for the Home yesterday, mid-afternoon, he was raising clouds of dust with that lumbering combine. Just up the road some other farmer was out in his fields doing the same thing, which made me think that my father-in-law would love to be out himself. He's 98, and each week, getting out and around is more of chore. Simply swinging his legs into the car is no fun, but I know--as does he--that a trip into the cornfields is worth the pain.
"It'll all look different by next week, if we don't get rain," he said maybe a half-dozen times, pointing out at the harvest like an old magistrate. For a half hour, his mind was rumbling along out in the corn beside whoever was coming up or down the rows. He never owned a one of those big combines himself, just a four-row picker he'd certainly have had ready to go right about now. Still, years ago when he left the farm, he did so, he told me, because he simply didn't care to try to ride the pressure of one more harvest, no stomach left for yet another round, he said.
So yesterday, he was a spectator in all the drama. He no longer has skin in the game, and that made it a joy to watch from the sidelines. Cooped up in the Home, his mind gets muddied and slow; at times, he can get ornery too. But get him out on gravel roads, let him watch the harvest, and he comes back to life. When a bin filled, one of those farmers drove his combine right up to the road where he had a tractor and a wagon ready to take the grain. Dad's eyes aren't what they were even a month ago, but rig was right there in front of him.
I wondered if he thought it was patronizing of me to keep us there, treating him as if he were a child, bringing him up close like that, up close to a job he'd done himself hundreds of times. There we sat. He didn't say a thing. I don't think he was thinking about me.
There's a comic moment in the movie Little Big Man (1970), when Old Lodge Skins (Chief Dan George) tells Little Big Man (Dustin Hoffman) that's it's time for him to die. Old Lodge Skins asks him to come along to the hills, where the old man sings his death song, ritual spear in hand, then simply lays down to wait for death to come. What Old Lodge Skins hadn't figured on was the rain that starts to fall. He starts to get up, then tells Little Big Man that sometimes the magic works, then again sometimes not. Together, they go back to camp.
It's cute and funny and somehow delightfully human, really meant as a joke.
"Lots more beans out than there was on Sunday," he told me several times out there on the gravel roads. On Sunday, when we took another ride, he didn't even know it was Sunday. Yesterday, he remembered the specifics of Sunday's country ride.
Somehow, I don't doubt that, like Old Lodge Skins, if he had a choice, he wouldn't mind dying out there, middle of harvest, on land he loves. I don't want to sound crass or unfeeling, don't want to disdain any of our own rituals; but he seems to live out there in the country, in the dust raised by a dozen combines on a picture-perfect Indian summer afternoon. He seems not to die, but to wake.
According to the USDA, the harvest is late this year, latest in the last eight years. As of yesterday, only 23 percent of the corn was out, 61 percent of the soybeans. If he were still out there with his old four-row corn picker, he'd nervous as a wet hen.
But he's past all that fear now. On our little pilgrimage yesterday, I took him past his land too. He wanted to see it, wanted to know what was happening.
Honestly, I think if he had a choice, he would choose to die there. That would be just fine. This morning I'm thankful for a harvest that helped him breathe.
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