When I came up, the quilts were in the lilacs and the yard was white like it had snowed. My car looked like somebody had gone over it with a ball peen hammer. The windshield held. The back glass did not.
Vince called that evening. He had been up on Lake Oahe after walleye and had watched the storm go by to the south of him.
“You get any of that?” he said.
“Some.”
“Car all right?”
I looked out the window at it.
“It’ll run,” I said.
“Well, that’s what insurance is for,” he said, and he was being kind. He truly thought he was being kind.
The body shop in Pierre wrote it up at four thousand one hundred dollars. My deductible was a thousand. I paid it out of the money I had been setting back for a new furnace, and I drove a loaner the size of a roller skate for sixteen days.
That is when I called the farm store.
I work four days a week at the farm store out on the truck bypass. I run the front counter and I know where everything is, which is most of the job.
The second week of October, two young men came in for grease cartridges, a case of hydraulic fluid and every box of mouse bait we had on the shelf. Dusty to the eyebrows, sunflower chaff on their caps.
“That’s a lot of mouse bait,” I said.
“We’ve got a lot of mice,” the older one said. “Or we’re about to.”
His name was Kurt Schmidt. His brother was Joel. They ran a custom harvest crew from up by Onida, two combines and two trucks, wheat from Oklahoma to the Canadian line every summer and sunflowers and corn around home every fall. Their dad had done it before them.
“We wintered the machines in a man’s shed up by Agar for six years,” Kurt said. “He sold out in August. New owner wants it for his own.”
“So where do they go?”
“Right now? Under the sky.” He said it like a man describing a death in the family. “Two combines. I can’t leave them out. Mice get in the wiring and a harness will run you three thousand dollars, and that’s before the snow gets in the bearings.”
I rang up the grease.
“How tall a door do you need?” I said.
They both looked at me.
“Fourteen foot,” Kurt said slowly. “Thirteen and a half if I fold the tank extensions down. Twenty wide if I want to keep the paint on the duals.”
“I’ve got fifteen by thirty,” I said. “On both ends.”
Joel set the mouse bait down on the counter.
They came out that Saturday. It was one of those October days we get before it turns, bright and still, sixty degrees, the cottonwoods along the creek gone to gold.
I walked them in the walk door on the south end and stood back and let them look.
They looked at the wagon, crossways. They looked at the old aluminum boat. They looked down the west wall at the camper and the good boat under its blue cover, and Len’s workbench beyond that, and then they looked at the north half. Sixty feet of bare concrete with a tractor in one corner and sunlight coming through the skylight panels in long dusty bars.
“Whose is all this up front?” Kurt asked.
“My brother’s.”
“He farm?”
“He’s retired from the highway department. He lives in town.”
“Ma’am, we can’t get past that wagon.”
“You won’t need to,” I said. “Come look at the other door.”
Sophia Rivers is an experienced News Content Editor with a sharp eye for detail and a passion for delivering accurate and engaging news stories. At TheArchivists, she specializes in curating, editing, and presenting news content that informs and resonates with a global audience.
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