TUESDAY, THE SIXTEENTH OF SEPTEMBER
It is 4:40 a.m. on Tuesday. Sunrise is two hours out.
The floodlights on the barn and the kitchen light in the house are the only lights in the valley.
Marianne is at the counter with twelve pieces of white bread in neat rows.
Orderly rows are everywhere on a dairy. Machines. Troughs. Fence. Corn standing for silage.
She puts mustard on the bread with a butter knife, smooth and practiced, not missing a corner, and does not look up when the door opens behind her.
Dell is nineteen. He has his father's build from that age — tall, lanky, a frame that has not finished yet.
He is looking forward to leaving the farm. Not because he hates it. The opposite.
He has applied to UW–River Falls for the fall, Dairy Science, College of Agriculture, Food and Environmental Sciences. He is proud of that in the way a boy is proud of a thing that still feels like an extension of his father and not a departure from him.
He has his boots in his left hand and makes for the table to put them on.
"Is he in the barn?"
"Yes, hon," Marianne says, not looking up. "Scraping the alley."
Dell nods and goes to the sink. He rinses the egg pans from breakfast.
A house with a harvest to put in does not leave dishes in the sink.
"Apples or peaches?"
"Peaches."
He sets the pans in the drainer and dries his hands on his jeans.
"Did he say anything about the weather?"
"He said it will hold. Rain on Friday, maybe."
"Sounds like we need to get it done then."
He takes the black lunch boxes off the top of the fridge and puts them on the counter. Sandwiches. Thermoses of coffee. Round tins of peaches. He packs them in the corners the way they have been packed every September for years. His first, then his dad's.
At 5:10 he takes the handles and heads for the barn.
"Dell."
He stops in the doorway.
"Watch the header."
He looks at her for a moment, nods, and goes out into the dark.
Marianne watches from the kitchen window until the yard light picks him up on the way to the machine shed and the low heavy note of the diesel comes through the house. Then she turns the light off and goes after the herd book.
The corn is coming off at 68.5 percent moisture. Two points wetter than Emmett would like, four points drier than Monday's check. Nothing to be done about it now. Rain in the forecast and ninety acres left. 68.5 will have to do.
The machine could fill the wagon on its own if he let it. The spout will find the box and correct for wind. Emmett has had that system off since shortly after the dealer put it in. He is faster, and when the computer hunts a corner it puts some over the side.
He drops the header into the standing rows. The engine climbs and falls as it eats. Twelve rows at thirty inches, the whole plant from tassel to stubble under the gathering chains.
Feed rollers at fourteen and a half feet a second. Nineteen millimeters, theoretical length of cut. What comes out of the spout is green and wet, an arc he has been putting in a wagon for thirty-one years.
At the headland he shuts the header and climbs down to the forage wagon. Up the ladder at the rear. A handful of the top load through his palm. No whole kernels. Processor rolls at two mil and doing their part.
Dell has the second wagon up beside the harvester, sun at his back, matching pace without being told. He has been good at that since he was fifteen.
"Sixty-eight five. That's fine."
"It's wet."
"Fine, says Dell."
He has a way of talking about himself in the third person. A joke from when he was six that he never outgrew.
"Hear back yet?"
"Not till spring."
"Spring."
"That's how it goes, Dad."
A pause on the radio. "They got my transcripts. I called."
"You did?"
"Twice. First woman said they didn't have them yet. Second said they did and she actually checked."
"Second woman was right." Satisfaction in the boy's voice.
"That's good news, son."
"Thanks, Dad."
"One small step for Dell-kind, one giant leap for—"
"Keep your line, Dell."
"Haha, and that's what Dell did."
The radio crackles. "I want to know if they are misplacing paperwork before I am a hundred and thirty-eight miles away."
"You don't know you're moving a hundred and thirty-eight miles."
"I was accepted."
"No. You are going to be." Emmett lets it hang. "Watch your line."
Dell laughs again.
The wagon comes a foot too near the spout. He makes the correction on instinct, and that is the end of the talk. Work puts an end to it.
This crew had been four men in previous years.
Dell's friends from school, Cole and Wyatt Vosberg, ran the wagons. Emmett chopped. Alvin Prahl packed.
They could put in a hundred and ten acres in a day and a half and eat standing in the field.
Not anymore. Cole is in Madison with an insurance job. Wyatt is hanging drywall somewhere outside the Cities.
A custom outfit would be through the acres in six hours for nine a ton. Emmett has run those numbers one way and another since August. They are no good.
So it is him and Dell.
Alvin is still around, sixty-six. Nobody asked him to be here. He is at home on the loader, packing the pile in a fashion Emmett would change if he had the mind for it. Help is help.
They put in four rounds. Wagon full, Dell gone, empty one back, start over. Another eight tons on the pile.
On the fifth round the metal detector goes off and everything stops.
Feed rollers quit. Cutterhead winds down under its own weight. The machine falls silent in stages. The console puts up its usual warning.
Emmett gets down and goes to the throat. Puts his hand in the corn in front of the rollers.
It takes a moment to find the gray rusty tie wire that tripped it. He pulls it out and walks back to the cab.
Four minutes lost.
He leaves the wire in the cab for now. Best place until they are done. Later it will go in the buckets by the shop door with the rest of sixty years of scrap — a bolt, a horseshoe, a piece of chain his father hauled out of the first field he ever worked.
He knows the invoice for what a bit of tie wire does to a cutterhead. He knows what wire in a cow's second stomach costs. No dairyman wants that acquaintance twice.
By two the afternoon is heating the corn. Wet and warm. The machine begins to slug.
North end, where the ground dips and the July wind laid the corn down. The alarm has not sounded when he feels the note drop and drag. He is already off the throttle.
Header off. Reverser to the feed rolls. Eases the mat back. Most of it gives.
Brake on. Climbs down. Lifts the hood over the throat while the machine runs. Reaches past the top roller, takes hold of the wad, pulls.
Forty pounds of green mat come out in one piece. He tosses it in the standing corn and is back in the seat in under two minutes.
Dell has the tractor window down forty feet off, watching him the way he watches everything.
Before three it happens again, and a third time. Wet year. You get plugged. Everybody knows.
At four he is on the headland with the header shut and the grease gun in hand.
The manifold and lines do most of it. A dozen spots the pump does not reach. Emmett does those by hand, twice a day. Every one of them outboard — spout ring, axle pins, the two U-joints on the header driveline. Nothing that means shutting the machine down to reach. So he does not. Header off, no corn going through, drum turning behind him the way it turns between rounds a dozen times a day. Nine minutes. He spends all nine of them thinking about something else.
He sets the gun on the step and walks around the front.
The right front tire has been getting soft since noon. Not flat. Leaking. One means he can finish tonight. The other means a bottle jack under twenty-two tons in the dark, on a tire taller than he is.
"Let it be the valve stem," he says to himself.
He crouches. Hand near the bead first — no air he can feel. Thumb over the valve stem. Listens.
The engine is idling at his back.
He can make out the tractor coming round to a halt, the door opening, boots on the ground. He does not look back.
The tire has something to say and he wants to hear it.
"There's a wad in it," Dell says.
"Where?"
"Left side of the bottom roller. It's wedged in there good."
"I'll help you, Dell."
"No, I got it."
A very slow hiss, hard to catch. He can feel it with his thumb.
"Dell, take the reverser first."
"I know."
The hood comes up. He would know that sound from a door in his own house.
Then the turbine note falls — the half-second sag when the machine takes a real load. A ring under it, high and metallic, under a second long, coming off the shear bar.
Emmett has been hearing that for thirty years, from this unit and the one before it.
It means metal went across the knives.
Still crouched by the tire, he thinks: Damn it, Dell, what did you drop?
The hood went up and the machine is still running. Those two things cannot both be true. Lift that hood and the rolls stop. That is how the machine is built, and in thirty-one years it is the one thing on it he has never had to think about.
In that moment it dawns on him that the boy has not used the reverser.
He has gone in to clear it by hand and dropped a wrench or a knife from the bench down there. They will be pulling the shear bar till dark. He is annoyed with his son.
That is the last thing Emmett Sauer ever feels about Dell that does not cost him something.
Then the note levels and runs clean.
He finds himself turning around without quite meaning to. Not for the noise. Because it does not make sense.
The tractor is idling with its door hanging open. A glove lies palm up by the tractor's left tire. Everything seems fine.
He does not run. He puts his hand on the harvester's disconnect and kills it.
It takes eleven seconds for the cutterhead to wind down.
He stands with his hand on the switch the whole time.
Once the quiet comes, there is only the wind.
Down in the yard, on the far side of the barn, Alvin Prahl is still at it with the loader, packing the pile.
The spout is aimed at the wagon.
The wagon is three-quarters full.