That Saturday, I drove into Marysville at one o’clock and signed Grandpa out at the front desk of Prairie View.
He was waiting in his room in a wheelchair, in his good blue shirt and suspenders, his white hair combed. Since the hip, he could walk only a few steps with a walker. But his eyes were sharp, and he smiled when he saw me.
“Jana. Where are we going?”
“For a drive.”
“A drive where?”
“It’s a surprise, Grandpa.”
He studied my face for a long moment. Then he nodded slowly, the way he did when he decided to trust somebody.
I got him into the passenger seat of my Buick and folded his wheelchair into the trunk. Then we drove north out of town, past the grain elevator and the Lutheran church where he’d been baptized, married, and where he’d buried his son. We took the gravel roads up Spring Creek toward Retta’s place.
He didn’t say anything. He just looked out the window at the fields going by. Brock’s soybeans, green and knee-high. A neighbor’s milo just starting to head out. Cattle standing in the creek shade.
I turned into Retta’s field and parked at the gate.
Retta’s thirty-five acres of brome lay in front of us in long, straight windrows. It was the third cutting, cut on Wednesday and raked that morning, sweet and green and dry, curving across the field in golden-green lines.
At the far end of the field sat Cordell’s green tractor, idling. Hitched behind it was a dusty pink New Holland 268 Hayliner.
Tucker was in the tractor seat in his backward ball cap. Reed stood on the hay wagon behind the baler in his work gloves. Curt and Cordell leaned against the hay wagon. Retta sat on the tailgate of her old pickup at the edge of the field with Banjo beside her.
Grandpa went completely still.
“That’s my baler,” he said.
“Yes, Grandpa.”
He leaned forward in the seat, his big, spotted hands gripping the dashboard. “That’s my 268.”
“The boys fixed it,” I said. “With Cordell. They put up two thousand bales this summer, Grandpa. We sold every one.”
He didn’t answer. He was staring at the baler.
I rolled down his window. It was a hot, still afternoon, and the air smelled of fresh-cut brome.
I picked up the little handheld radio Cordell had given me.
“Okay, Tucker,” I said. “Go ahead.”
Down at the end of the field, Tucker reached back and engaged the power takeoff.
The old baler shuddered. The flywheel began to turn. The pickup reel started spinning. Then the plunger caught, and the sound came drifting across the field to us, deep and steady.
Thump. Thump. Thump.
Like a heartbeat.
Tucker eased the tractor forward. The pickup teeth swept up the first windrow. A minute later, the first bale slid out the back of the chute and up onto the wagon, and Reed caught it and stacked it.
Grandpa closed his eyes.
His hand came off the dashboard, found my arm, and held on.
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