“That’s not much of a deal for you,” I said.
“Wade. I sell insurance. I have a pension. I don’t need this farm to feed me.”
He looked out across the yard at the house. At the yellow curtain in the kitchen window.
“I need it to be here. And I need to be let onto it.”
“Let onto it how?”
He was a long time answering.
“Planting. One week, every spring. I want to drive a tractor on this place. And I want somebody who knows what he’s doing to tell me whether I did it right.”
I stuck out my hand.
He took it.
That was the whole contract. On the tailgate of a blue pickup. With the arithmetic written on the back of our father’s envelope.
The paperwork took until Christmas. But it was only paperwork.
We drove over to Butch’s place together that same evening.
He was sitting on his porch. He listened to the whole thing with his thumbs in his bibs and didn’t interrupt once.
When we were done, he said five thousand was exactly what he’d have offered Albert. Then he shook Phil’s hand. Then mine.
“Took the two of you long enough,” he said.
“We had it under the seat of a truck,” Phil told him.
Butch never did ask what that meant.
I won’t tell you that corn was saved. It was nursed.
The co-op sprayed it Monday morning. We put nitrogen on beside the row that same week. And the pivot walked all through July.
In October, the pivot quarter made a hundred and seventy-one bushels to the acre. Dad would have made two hundred fifteen.
The east eighty, which Butch let us harvest one last time, made ninety-four.
Phil rode in the combine with me every single round.
When the yield monitor finally read the average for the pivot, he looked at it for a long time.
“That forty-four bushels,” he said, “is what my pride cost.”
Then he took out Dad’s green notebook and wrote the number down himself. In ink. With the date.
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