SATURDAY, SUNDAY
They bring the wagon up at eight.
Sowinski went off at six and there is a different deputy at the head of the field road, a heavyset man in his forties who keeps his hat on and stays with his car.
Kastner is there in a suit. Marianne is there. Alvin is there with the backhoe. Merle Dietz's brother is there from the church, and the pastor is there, and a county surveyor named Ostergaard is there with a rod and a receiver because the site has to be recorded.
Nobody asked any of these people to come except the last one.
Emmett backs the wagon to the north edge and sets the brake and climbs down and looks at Marianne, and she nods once.
He runs the apron.
It takes four minutes.
The chains pull the load back and the beaters throw it and it goes over the edge in a wave, green and wet and steaming a little in the morning air, and it makes the sound it always makes, which is a heavy wet rushing sound, and it fills about a third of the hole.
Four minutes is also what it costs a man to clear a plug the way the factory tells him to — shut down, clear, start, wait for the drum, re-engage — and Emmett is the only person standing in that corner who knows both numbers.
The pastor says the twenty-third psalm because that is what there is.
Marianne says the whole thing with him, every word, in a steady voice, and does not look at the hole while she does it.
Emmett stands with his hat in his hands and does not say any of it.
Ostergaard waits until the pastor is finished and everybody has started back toward the trucks, and then he sets the rod up on the north stake and takes his shot and writes down two numbers.
Those two numbers go to the register of deeds in Neillsville on Monday, the twenty-second, and they are still there, and they are going to matter a great deal to a great many people in about thirteen months, and not one person standing in that corner on Saturday morning has any idea of it.
That is the funeral.
There will be another one in a couple of weeks in the church basement, once the chop is off, with coffee and a folding table of photographs and a hundred and fifty people — and this was the one.
Alvin stays.
"You want it closed."
"Not yet."
Alvin looks at him.
"There's the wagon," Emmett says.
Alvin nods slowly, and then keeps nodding for longer than a nod takes, and then says, "All right," and goes and gets the hose reel off Emmett's service truck without being asked.
Those are the last words either of them says until Sunday night.
You cannot wash a forage wagon into a field.
That is not sentiment. That is the fact of it, and it is the reason the hole is still open, and Emmett worked it out on Thursday and has not said it out loud to anybody.
He pulls the wagon forward so the tailgate is over the north lip of the hole, and he takes the pressure washer off the truck and runs it off the generator, and he starts at the front bulkhead and works back — the walls, the floor, the chain, every slat, the beaters, the corners where the floor meets the wall and where a man's hand does not fit — and everything that comes off it goes over the edge, because there is nowhere else in the world for it to go.
It takes him two hours to do the wagon.
Then he pulls the wagon away and brings the Vosskuhl up.
It takes the rest of Saturday and most of Sunday.
He pulls the corn head off with the loader and sets it on blocks and washes it down, every row unit, every gathering chain, the augers, the divider points, until the water coming off it is clear.
Then he opens the feed roll housing and takes out the four rollers, which is not a one-man job, and he does it as one man, and he washes each one and lays it on plastic.
He takes out the shear bar.
He takes out the knives.
There are forty-eight of them and each is held by two bolts, and he lays them out on a tarp in rows of twelve in the order he removed them, because that is how you keep a cutterhead in balance.
Then he washes the drum in the housing with the wand, working around it a quarter turn at a time with a bar.
He pulls the kernel processor rolls and washes those.
He opens the blower housing at the base of the spout and washes the paddles and the liner, and then he stands on the top rail and runs the wand up the spout itself, nine feet of it, and the water comes back down on him and he keeps going.
All of it runs off the machine and down the slope and into the hole.
He set the machine where he set it for that reason. He picked the spot Saturday noon with his eye on the grade, the way he would pick a spot to park a manure spreader, and there is no word for the state of mind in which a man does that correctly.
By Sunday afternoon there is nine inches of standing water in the bottom of it and he has stopped noticing.
At some point he becomes aware that Alvin Prahl has been there the entire time, holding lights, moving the generator, handing him a three-quarter wrench before he has asked for it.
He puts it back together Sunday night.
Processor rolls in and gapped at two mil with the feeler.
Blower liner in.
Feed rollers back in the housing, chains on.
Shear bar set.
Then the knives, all forty-eight, back into the drum in the order they came out, each one to spec, and the spec is one hundred and ten foot-pounds, and he does every one of them with the torque wrench and hears it click, forty-eight times.
Then the corn head goes back on, because there are ninety acres standing and Monday is tomorrow.
The machine that comes out of that yard Sunday night is in better condition than it was on Tuesday morning. That is a true statement and there is no getting around it, and in sixteen days a forensic engineer from Eau Claire is going to say something very close to it out loud in this same yard and mean it as a compliment.
Then he closes the hole.
He runs the loader until about one in the morning and puts the dirt back and crowns it about two inches, because ground settles, and a grave that settles is a hollow in a field, and he is not going to have that.