MONDAY
Monday morning he is out at six.
The pile behind the barn is half packed, and half a pile spoils.
That is the whole of it. That is the entire argument, and it has no other side to it.
Silage that is not covered and not packed heats and molds, and by December it is not feed, it is a problem, and there are ninety-one cows in that barn that eat every single day between now and April whether or not anything has happened to anybody.
Nobody had to explain that to him. Nobody would have had to explain it to Dell either.
He knows how this is going to look from the road.
He has thought about it, lying in the chair at three in the morning, and he decided that he does not care. Then at about seven-fifteen, when the first car slows on County K and stays slow the whole length of the field, he finds that he does care.
And then he keeps going.
There are two wagons.
He hooks to the one nearest the shed, because it is nearest the shed.
Here is what one man is:
He chops until the wagon is full, which takes about eleven minutes on good corn. Then he stops. He climbs down and unhooks and gets in the tractor and pulls the full wagon down to the pile behind the barn and dumps it, and gets on the loader and packs for as long as he dares, because there is nobody on the loader, and then he brings the empty back and hooks up and climbs back into the Vosskuhl.
Round trip is twenty-six minutes. Twelve of them are on the loader.
So he is chopping eleven minutes out of every thirty-seven, which is a machine worth four hundred thousand dollars running at thirty percent.
There were four men. Four men is one man in the seat all day and the seat never goes cold, and a machine like that at ninety tons an hour is the cheapest thing on the farm.
One man is the most expensive thing on the farm.
And the packing is what suffers for it. A pile wants a loader on it the whole time the wagons are coming. What it gets instead is Emmett, on the loader, for twelve minutes a trip, doing what he can.
The second wagon stays hooked to the other tractor by the shed the whole eleven days. He never uses it. There is nobody to pull it.
That is the number, and once a number like that is in a man it does not come out. It has been sitting in the front of his head since Saturday, and it will be there in the shed in August, and it will be there in a sealed cab in October.
Ninety acres. Eleven days.
The math is not complicated. He does it once in the seat and once on the back of a feed receipt at the kitchen counter at nine o'clock at night.
Ninety acres at four and a half tons to the acre is four hundred tons. At eight tons to the wagon, that is fifty wagons. Fifty wagons at thirty-seven minutes apiece is thirty-one hours of chopping and hauling.
Thirty-one hours is three days — the kind of days they used to have, out at first light and in when the dew comes up.
Except it is not three days, because a man alone does not do eleven hours. A man alone does chopping and hauling on top of two milkings and a feeding and nine calves and a fresh pen, and the milkings do not move. So the eleven hours becomes four, and four hours a day into thirty-one hours is eight days, and eight days becomes eleven, because something goes wrong about twice a week and this is a wet year.
Eleven days is not an estimate.
It is the answer.
He could call the Vosbergs.
Ted Vosberg would come. Ted Vosberg would come tonight, and he would bring both boys home from wherever they are if Emmett asked him to, and Cole would come from Madison and Wyatt would come from outside the Cities, and there would be four men in this field by Wednesday and the crew would be back to what it was, and that is exactly why he is not going to ask.
They have already milked his cows for six days.
There is a limit to what a man can take from people and go on being able to look at them, and Emmett passed it Wednesday afternoon standing in a parlor with a swept step-up and nothing in it for him to do.
That is not pride. He would tell you it is not pride, and he would be about sixty percent right.
Marianne watches him go out from the porch.
She is still there when he comes back with the first load, standing in her coat with her arms folded, not saying anything, not coming down the steps.
He raises two fingers off the wheel going past.
She does not raise anything back.
She goes inside.