TUESDAY EVENING
The dispatcher wants to know if the patient is breathing.
Emmett is standing in the middle of the field with the phone pressed to his ear and the machine dead and silent behind him, and he says, "No."
She asks him to confirm that the patient is not breathing.
"Ma'am, there is no patient." And then, barely a whisper: "My boy is — he's gone."
She keeps him on the line.
She is just doing her job, so she asks him three more times to check, and he does not move to check, because there is nothing left to check.
She stops asking.
She tells him somebody is on the way.
She says, "Stay where you are."
She calls him Mr. Sauer. She has it off the address on her screen and she uses it four times, and it is the last time all evening that anybody says his last name out loud.
He stays.
It takes the first squad eighteen minutes.
In those eighteen minutes, he does not move and does not sit down and does not look in the wagon, and does not look away from it either.
The wind pulls across the fields from the northwest and rustles the standing corn. Down in the yard, on the far side of the barn, Alvin Prahl's loader keeps backing and turning.
Then it stops.
Alvin has looked up and counted the time passing and worked out that the next load hasn't shown up.
He cannot see this field from where he is sitting. The barn is between them. All he has is arithmetic — eleven minutes to fill a wagon and fourteen to bring it over and dump it and bring the empty back — and the arithmetic has quit coming out right.
He does not get in the truck.
That is the first kindness anybody does for Emmett Sauer that day, and he is not going to understand that it was one until Wednesday afternoon.
At four forty-seven, the phone vibrates in his shirt pocket.
He takes it out. It is Marianne.
She has heard the machine stop.
She has heard it running all hours of the day, for many years, and she knows the sound of the harvester quitting at the end of a row, and she knows the sound of it dying in the middle of one.
She has been standing at the kitchen sink for way too long now, waiting for it to start again.
"Why won't he pick up the damn phone?" she quietly asks no one in particular.
Emmett is numb; he can't.
He looks at her name on the glowing screen until it goes dark.
She calls again at four forty-nine. She calls again at four fifty-three.
Then she stops calling, and the silence is worse than the ringing.
He puts the phone back in his shirt pocket.
Right behind the ambulance, there is a sheriff's cruiser, and it slams to a halt when the deputy sees a man standing alone in the middle of a field.
The deputy is a kid named Sowinski who has been on the job for five months.
He comes out from the road, jogging fast until he is about forty feet away, and then he sees that Emmett hasn't moved a muscle, and he slows down.
"Sir, where's the —"
Emmett points at the wagon.
Sowinski looks at the wagon and then at the machine and then at the wagon again, and Emmett watches him not understand, and then slowly, watches him understand.
He says, "Okay." Then, "Jesus Christ."
He says it twice more on the way back to the car.
Then he backs the squad up nine feet and turns it so the headlights are pointed off across the stubble and not at the wagon.
Nobody told him to do that. There is no line in any manual about where to aim a set of headlights. Nobody ever mentions it, that evening or afterward, and this is a book full of things nobody mentions.
Dispatch codes it as a machinery entrapment because that is the only code they have.
So the Rehm Volunteer Fire Department gets toned out at four forty-four for an extrication, and eleven men drop what they are doing and race to the station.
Once organized, they bring the pumper and the grass rig and a Hurst tool that four of them have trained on, but none of them have ever used.
They arrive at six minutes past five.
Deverell runs the body shop in Rehm and has thirty-one years on the department. In thirty-one years he has been to four of these, and not one of them was this.
He walks out into the field ahead of the rest of them with his coat hanging open. Sowinski points him toward the wagon the same way Emmett pointed Sowinski there a few minutes ago, and that is the last direction anybody has to give him all evening.
He climbs the ladder at the rear and looks in.
If he says anything up there, he says it to himself and the wind takes it, and a man standing forty feet off does not get one word of it.
Then he comes down, and he walks back to his own men and says something in a voice Emmett cannot hear either, and none of the eleven of them come any closer.
They stand by their trucks on the field road for an hour and a quarter.
Nobody sends them home, and nobody tells them to go, so they stay, and at some point somebody starts a fire in a barrel at the end of the road because it is getting cold, and that is what the fire department does that evening.
She arrives at ten past five.
She does not wait for anybody. She saw the ambulance come down County K from the kitchen window and turn onto the field road with the lights flashing, and she walked straight out the porch door and started across the dirt.
Eleven hundred feet of stubble in barn boots, because it is twenty minutes to milking and she was already dressed for it. She has one of Dell's sweatshirts on. She has the DHIA clipboard in her left hand, and she has carried it the whole way across the field and doesn't even know she is holding it.
Brodhagen is not there yet.
There are four men in that field, and Emmett is one of them, and he sees her coming from over four hundred feet away, and he turns and walks the other way, toward the machine. He stands at the header with his back to all of it.
He is not going to be able to account for that later. He doesn't even try.
It is Sowinski who goes out to meet her, five months on the job, twenty-four years old, and he stops her at about a hundred feet and says whatever he has to say, and she puts her hand on his arm, which is the wrong way around, and neither of them notices.
Then she goes around him.
Nobody tells her not to look.
Nobody would have been able to stop her, so nobody tries.
She stands at the wagon for nearly a minute.
Then she puts her hand flat on the side of it, on the green-painted steel, right where the top of the load would be, and leaves it there.
Then she walks back to the house.
She is still carrying the clipboard.
She goes past the tractor on her way, and past the glove lying palm up by the left front tire, and she does not pick it up, and neither does anybody else, and it is still lying there in the dark when they put the tarp on.
Sheriff Brodhagen gets there at twenty after five with the medical examiner behind him, and after that it is other people's field.
He takes his hat off at the end of the field road, before he starts walking, which is a thing men here do at a house and not at a scene, and he does not put it back on for two hours.
They want Emmett to walk them through it. That is the phrase the sheriff uses — walk us through it — and so Emmett stands at the throat of a Vosskuhl FX-990 with three men in a half circle behind him holding notebooks.
Brodhagen. An investigator named Gary Lemke who has come out from Neillsville and has said nine words so far. And Sowinski, five months on the job, writing down everything anybody says because nobody has told him not to.
Emmett explains what a forage harvester does.
He explains the gathering chains.
He explains the feed rollers, four of them, two above and two below, and what they are for, which is to compress a mat and present it to the shear bar at a constant rate.
He explains the cutterhead and the number of knives on it, and the speed at which they turn.
He explains that the machine does not cut so much as it takes, and that the difference matters.
One of the men writes that down. Emmett sees him write it down and immediately wishes he had not said it.
Takes.
The whole time he is talking, the hood over the throat is standing open above his right shoulder, the way it has been standing open since twenty to five.
None of the three men ask about it.
Emmett does not close it.
They ask how long.
"About a second," he says.
They ask him how he knows that.
He tells them the feed rate. Ninety tons an hour on the plate.
He tells them what that comes to in pounds a second, and he doesn't have to work it out on paper, and one of them looks at another one, and Emmett hears the tone of his own voice and stops.
Then Lemke asks whether he heard anything.
"The note came down," Emmett says. "There was a wad in it. That's a wad going through, is what that is."
Lemke waits.
"And there was a ring on top of it."
"A ring?"
"Off the shear bar."
He is looking right at the shear bar while he says it.
"It's high. It's a second, less. It's what it sounds like when there's a rock come up in the row."
Nobody says anything. They are waiting for him to say what he made of it.
There are two answers to that, and he gives them the one a man can give standing in front of three men with notebooks.
"I thought it was a stone."
Lemke writes stone on his pad and underlines it. Emmett watches him do it and does not correct him.
The header was shut. Nothing had come up out of any row in ten minutes, and a man who has run this machine thirty-one years knows there is no such thing as a rock out of a field the machine is not eating. He knew it before the ring finished. He says it anyway, and three men write it down, and not one of them knows enough to catch it.
The other answer is that what went through him was Damn it, Dell, what did you drop.
He does not say that. Not to these men, not that evening, not to anybody, ever.
It is Sowinski who wants to know about the metal detector.
He is the youngest of the three, and he asks it carefully, the way a man asks a question he thinks might be the important one.
Emmett tells him the machine has one. He tells him where the coil sits, which is in the lower feed roll, and what it is for, which is tramp metal — a bolt, a fence staple, a piece of a tine off somebody's rake — because a piece of steel through a cutterhead ruins forty-eight knives and a shear bar and a man's whole week.
He tells him it is a ferrous coil.
The young man does not understand yet, so Emmett says the rest of it.
"It looks for iron. It won't see a person."
He says it flat, the way he has said everything else in this field, and it is the only true and complete sentence anybody speaks out loud all evening, and none of the four men standing there can do one thing with it.
That detector fired once already today.
It fired a little after one o'clock on a rusted piece of tie wire about the length of a man's hand, and it stopped ninety tons an hour in about the time it takes to blink, and it cost him four minutes, and he was glad to have it.
The wire is in the cab right now. It is on the ledge under the right-hand window where he set it so it would not get lost before he could put it in the bucket.
It did not fire at twenty to five.
Nobody asks him anything else for a while.
The cows came up at ten to five.
Ninety-one head came up out of the west lot on their own, the way they have come up every day of their lives, and they are still standing at the holding pen gate, and nobody has come.
They can hear them from the field. It goes on, and it gets louder, the way it does, and then at about six o'clock it stops, and Emmett registers that it has stopped and doesn't have anywhere to put that feeling.
At about half past five, Brodhagen comes around the front of the machine with his hat in his hand.
"Emmett. Is there anybody I should be calling?"
"No."
Brodhagen waits a second to see if anything else is coming.
"Her sister."
"Ruth," Emmett says after a moment. "In Chippewa Falls."
"You want me to do that, or do you want to?"
"You do it."
Brodhagen nods once and walks off toward the road with his phone, forty yards away, far enough that Emmett cannot hear any of it. It is a courtesy, and Emmett understands it as such, but it does not help.
Verlyn Kastner is the Oster County medical examiner, and he is also the man who buried Emmett's father, because in a county this size, a man does two things.
He stands looking into the wagon for a long time with his hands at his sides.
He does not take out a notebook. Of the men in that field he is the only one who has stood on this ground before, in a suit, in 2018, and he is the only one who does not say a word for ten minutes.
Then he says, "Emmett."
"Verlyn."
"I'm going to need some time here."
"Take it."
By nine, it is fully dark.
They have put a tarp over the wagon and weighted the corners with stuff from the truck. Sowinski's squad is parked eight feet away with the engine running for the heater, still pointed off across the stubble, and Sowinski is going to be there all night because that is the job and because there is nowhere else to put any of this.
Brodhagen asks if there is somebody who can come sit with them.
Emmett says there isn't.
Brodhagen says he'll have somebody call in the morning, and Emmett thanks him, and the trucks go out one at a time down the field road, their lights casting long shapes in the corn.
The fire department goes last.
Somebody has put the barrel out with a shovel of dirt.
Emmett sits in his own truck fifty feet from the wagon.
At half past nine, he gets out.
He walks up the yard toward the shed, and he goes past the barn, and the barn is dark, and the compressor is running, and the tank is cooling, and the parlor floor is wet and swept.
The milkhouse door is propped with the block, the way a man props it when his hands are full.
Ninety-one head got milked after six o'clock by somebody, and he does not know who, and he does not find out that night, and he does not find out the next morning either.
He stands in the yard for a second.
Then he fills a five-gallon pail at the hydrant and carries it to the pen and pours it into the tub, and does it again, and throws two flakes of hay to the goats, and checks that the hens are shut in, and runs his hand once down the gelding's neck on the way past because the animal is standing at the gate wanting it.
Then he goes back to the truck.
It is nine forty-five.
The animals get water at five and at nine. They have always gotten water at five and at nine.