They brought the combines in the first Thursday of November, after three hard frosts. I heard them before I saw them, coming across the hay ground from the section line, two big green machines with their headers off and their lights on in the gray morning, and Kenzie’s whole fifth grade could have heard me holler when the first one cleared that door with a hand’s width to spare on top.
Before they brought anything in, they swept. I want that written down. Two grown men with push brooms, sixty feet by sixty, before breakfast.
Then the combines, nose to tail down the east side. Then the two headers on their trailers, and a grain cart. Joel hung a fire extinguisher on a post. Kurt set bait stations every twelve feet along the wall like a man laying out a garden. They slid drip pans under both machines. By noon that half of the shed looked like the showroom at the implement dealer in Pierre.
And right across a blue chalk line, there was Vince’s half.
The hay wagon had a sparrow nest in the front rack and two deck boards rotted through. The good boat was fine under its cover. The old aluminum one was not under anything. It was full of leaves and a coffee can of rusted lures and what had been a boat cushion before the mice got to it, and its trailer sat flat on the floor on four dead tires, the rubber cracked like a dry creek bed.
Kurt came to the house about one o’clock with his cap in his hand.
“Ma’am, I don’t want to speak out of turn.”
“Go ahead.”
“That fishing boat’s on four flat tires and it’s a mouse hotel. I’m baiting hard on our side, but they’ll just come across. I’m not asking you to do anything. I only wanted you to know I saw it, so you don’t think it was us.”
“I appreciate that.”
He turned his cap around once.
“And that camper’s leaking.”
“It’s inside a building, Kurt.”
“Yes, ma’am. I mean it’s leaking out. Come look.”
I went and looked.
Vince had taken that camper out West River for antelope the first week of October and had been rained on for two days, and I knew the roof seam had been bad since at least the summer before, because Pam had complained about a wet mattress. What I did not know was where the water went afterward. It went down inside the back wall. And a month later it was still finding its way out of the rear corner, one drop at a time, onto the end of Len’s workbench.
There was a brown ring on the plank top as big as a dinner plate. The wood had swelled and split. The top drawer under it would not open.
I stood there with my hand flat on that bench.
Len built it out of bridge planks the county was throwing away. He had his coffee at it every morning of his life. His vise was on it, and the radio that only got the one station, and in those drawers were the tools his dad had left him and the ones I had bought him, one a Christmas, for thirty-one years.
“I can get that drawer open if you want,” Kurt said quietly. “I’d go slow.”
“Not today,” I said. “Thank you. I can’t today.”
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