LATE SEPTEMBER
The harvesting days go like this.
He is out at six and in at nine at night, and the middle of it is a single unbroken thing that does not have parts.
He eats standing at the counter. He falls asleep in the chair twice and wakes with the yard light coming through the window and goes back out, and both times he is up before he is properly awake, which is a thing the body will do for you if you let it.
There is a mercy in it, and it is the only one on offer, and it is this: a man in the seat of a forage harvester in standing corn cannot think about anything else. The row has to be straight. The spout has to be on the wagon. The moisture moves through the day and the length of cut moves with it. Eleven minutes of complete attention, and then the tractor and the loader, and those are the bad part.
The rain does not come.
It was supposed to come Friday, and it does not come Friday, and it does not come Saturday, and by the middle of the second week the forecast has stopped mentioning it at all, the way a forecast will, without ever admitting to anything.
The corn dries a point and a half over the eleven days. That makes it better to chop and worse for the pile.
He adjusts the length of cut twice and the processor gap once, and both times he does it right, and both times it takes him about ninety seconds with a feeler gauge and a flashlight, and there is nobody within a mile who could tell you what he did or why.
On the fourth day he catches a fencepost with the spout.
He is swinging back onto the wagon at the headland and he is tired and he brings it around eight or ten degrees too far and holds it there for maybe a second and a half.
Wet silage leaves that pipe at right around a hundred miles an hour.
When he shuts down and walks over, the post — a white oak corner his grandfather set, eight inches through, in the ground since the Eisenhower administration — has a groove cut into it about the depth of his thumb, going with the grain, three feet long, and the wood inside the groove is bright and wet and new.
That is what chopped corn does to white oak in a second and a half.
He stands there and looks at it for a while.
He does not have a thought about it. That is worth saying, because a reader will want him to have one. He looks at a groove in a fencepost with his hands at his sides, and then he goes back and finishes the round.
The pile starts to work about day five.
That is what it is supposed to do. You pack it and you seal it and the sugars go over and it goes acid and sweet, and a good pile smells like bread and cider and a little like something a man would drink, and farmers who have done this all their lives will tell you they like the smell, and they are telling the truth.
He can smell it from the field when the wind is right.
The phone rings in the house through all of it.
Marianne takes the ones she can take. Somewhere in the second week the church calls about the memorial and a date gets set for the fourth of October, and Emmett is told about it at the counter with a plate in his hand and says that is fine, and it is not a lie exactly, because he has nothing at all to say about the fourth of October.
He is thinking about the moisture. It has come down to sixty-seven and it will keep coming down, and the pile is going to be drier on top than it is at the bottom, and that is a thing he will be paying for in March.
That is where his head is. A man can only put it in one place.
The animals get water at five and at nine. The hens are shut in at dusk. The goats get hay morning and night, and the gelding gets hay and half a scoop. Emmett does all of it now, in the dark on both ends, and he does not think of it as anything except that it needs doing.
If you had asked him on day six why he did not simply run the goats over to the Prahls' for a couple of weeks — Alvin would have taken them, Alvin would have been glad of the job — he would have looked at you for a second and said that they are fine where they are.
Day seven Marianne stops coming out.
She has been coming as far as the yard, not to the field, not since Saturday. On day seven she does not, and on day eight she does not, and that is that.
He comes in at nine-forty on day eight and the kitchen light is off and the hall light is on, and he can hear her through the bedroom door.
She is saying names.
Bett, and Ninety-One, and Chalk, and Dot, and Half-Ear, and Bett's Bett, and Rhonda, and she is going in the order they come into the parlor, which is not alphabetical and not numerical and not any order that exists anywhere in the world except in her, and she is naming ninety-one cows in the dark.
He stands in the hall and listens to about a dozen of them.
Then he goes and washes his hands.