The Plenty, Page 2

  Chapter 2.

  "Shut it down," said Ray Marak, motioning with his hand at his neck. The driver of the combine, Judd Blanks, turned off the engine, causing the rusting behemoth to clatter and knock until the engine stopped, emitting several guttural diesel sounds, bucking forward nearly a yard in the last throe.

  "Thought we might finish a field once without a breakdown," said Ray. "Five more minutes and we're done here."

  "Should I call the service guy again?" asked Judd, who stood on the combine's platform, scratching his head using his hat.

  "No," said Ray, "it's just plugged."

  "Again?" said Judd. "You need a new combine."

  "Do you have a hundred thousand dollars to loan me?

  "I don't have a hundred dollars."

  "You just got paid. Where'd that money go?"

  Judd dismounted the combine and walked in rangy steps. With one knee bent and his boot on a fender of the cornhead, Judd announced with equal parts pleasure and shame, "Bought a new car stereo."

  Crammed with dirt and wadded plants, the augur at the front of the combine resembled a beaver dam. An ear of corn fell out and Ray picked it up to inspect. Golden rows aligned on the ear, plump but wet. The yield would be high but the freeze did not come until late September and the July and August rains made all things moist too long. A month since the freeze, but the weight of the ear in his hand still had heft. 1992 would be a bumper crop year, but with the wetness, the bin dryers would run until Christmas and drink kilowatt-hours day and night. Always some unforeseen cost, some thousand or ten thousand dollars not factored in during spring planting. Forecast for the weekend told of more rain, possible freezing. And fat ears with ice fall off of plants. Time was indeed money.

  It was the fourth day of harvest for Ray and he had breakdowns from the first field. With the Marak acreage already finished, he had moved on to the Masterson farm, where Ray rented the land. The death of Renee's father, Ben Masterson, made the land Ray's – not to own, but to rent. Renee, Ray's wife, jointly owned the property with her two brothers, both of whom refused to sell their share because they entertained ideas of coming back to Immaculate to farm after they retired from their business careers in the suburbs. But with each passing year, their homecoming became less likely and the discussion of selling the land became a topic to avoid at holiday gatherings. One of the brothers had showed his hand, admitting that he was monitoring agricultural land prices. In different discussions, the brother, an avid fisherman, spoke of plans to buy a cabin on Leech Lake, making it obvious to Ray – should the sale come, he would be paying the full market rate for the Masterson land.

  Even without owning it outright, Ray increased his land from one hundred sixty acres to four hundred. Ben Masterson, shrewder than suspected, managed to buy and pay for a few small surrounding farms, creating a significant property before he died. Through this rental arrangement, sibling politics aside, Ray became a cash-cropper, increasing his income. He remained cheap about machinery.

  "Pull hard," Ray said, watching Judd strain. "Put your back into it. You can't just pull out the stalks that you can see – the problem is inside, you gotta get your hand in there."

  "You're the one that plugged it," said Judd, letting go with a grunt. "That clump is tighter than a nun." He stood on the augur, tightening his gloves.

  "How would you know?" said Ray. He looked at Judd and shook his head at the imagery. Not the hardest of workers, but aside from his dirty mouth, Judd was fairly reliable and arrived on time when not on a bender. For eight years, Judd had helped with hay and harvest. Having no steady job, the thirty-two-year old drifted from construction jobs to farm work, taking time off in between stints to unload his money, on cars mostly. The rest of it on women, whims, and gambling on pull-tabs. The boys, Ethan and Jacob, seemed to like him, although Renee wished him away for the crudeness of his mouth.

  "You're younger than me," said Ray. "Shouldn't take a man in his forties to clear this one."

  "I'm saving myself for when I run my own place," he said.

  "Think of this as your own place, Judd. Step aside."

  "I can get it."

  "Get," said Ray, propping his feet against the augur, throwing his gloves to the ground. He reached into the machine with both hands, fastening himself to a lump inside and leaned back, slowly turning the augur and clump until the mess broke loose and the corn, leaves, and dirt spilled down the fenders onto the gathering chains.

  "There," said Ray, inspecting a small cut on his finger. "Not so hard, was it? Go fire it up again."

  They hopped down to the ground. Judd climbed into the cab, started the engine, and engaged the cornhead. With a foot on the fender, Ray leaned forward to observe the moving parts. The augur turned. The gathering chains climbed backward toward the augur, the augur screw turned in its hypnotizing loop. Ready to pick.

  Ray motioned Judd to come down. They met at the bottom of the ladder where Ray gave him instructions. He yelled over the engine noise. "Pull those three gravity boxes into the field across the road. Don't just pull them wagons in and drop 'em, turn 'em around so that they face the road. Otherwise we'll tip on the way out like we did last year. I don't have a mighty desire to shovel a couple hundred bushels off the ground again."

  "Sure thing."

  "I'm going to finish this field and then start on the field across the road."

  The ever-present smirk left Judd's face. "You mean…are you going to do that whole field yet tonight? The big field?"

  Ray said, "That's the plan."

  Judd nodded. "You know, it's getting dark."

  "Getting dark, huh." Ray considered Judd's comment and said, "Yeah, I can read between the whines. Afraid to ask or what? Yes, you can go home."

  "Actually, my girl is on me about spending time," Judd said, needing an excuse to get away and drink until full.

  "Spending time?" said Ray. "Women have a way of saying things. Better go see her then."

  "She's scratching at the walls."

  "She get in some poison ivy? I know she can't be bad after a scrawny rat like yourself."

  "I could take you, Ray."

  "You can take a…." He stopped. Nowhere to go with his rejoinder but to cuss, so he stopped, and after a series of blowups in the past year, he decided he could swear less at the cattle and tools. "See you in the morning."

  Ray climbed the ladder of the combine and started flipping switches, setting his radio station to AM so that he could listen to the Immaculate football game against Sharpsboro, hoping to hear Jacob's name. Last year, the harvest forced Ray to miss a game when Jacob had scored two touchdowns.

  Ray watched Judd walk toward the tractor parked in the ditch. The hired man broke into a trot, and then a fast jog, like a child released from school. In the combine cab, Ray made a final check of his gauges and turned on the lights. A host of halogens brightened the field in front of him. He dropped the combine into gear, let the machine crawl forward like a tank into the rows, set the cornhead down, and watched stalks fall, devoured between the pointed fenders as the chains ripped the plants upward into the augur, through the thresher, spewing the remains of leaves and dust onto a field of stubble.

  Within ten minutes, he had finished the field and pointed his wheels toward the road. The next field was on the other side of the highway. No sleep, he decided, until the next sixty acres was in the wagons and bins. Before the rain, the freeze.

  From the cab, Ray could see far. Crossing the road, he looked toward the Werther house on the far side of the field, tucked away on a long private driveway. The house still irritated Ray, ever since Josh purchased the parcel to build his country estate. Bad enough that their lives intersected through the bank and Ethan, but Josh also made his home on the same land of Ray's wife. The hatchet was buried, he had forgiven for Werther and Renee for the past. Buried and forgiven does not mean forgotten. Try as he did
, Ray often slipped on his dedication to forgiveness when the problem of remembering interjected. The decision had not been Ray's to sell that square of land to Werther, nor was it Renee's - her brothers held a majority. Then again, no one could say no to Josh Werther when he offered to pay a premium for those three wooded acres. As for Ray, the Masterson land was not his, not yet, and Werther received the title to his parceled land.

  Not far from the house, Ray noticed a gap in the cornfield, a hole where no plants stood, and he squinted at it. "What the hell happened over there?" he said, looking at the void, where no stalks stood, wondering if he had forgotten to set the line while planting in the spring, or if the planter had failed to drop seeds for a moment.

  Ray's attention turned away from the gap when he noticed that Judd had parked the three wagons in the wrong direction, right after Ray told him otherwise. He swore several times, turned up the volume on the radio, and dropped the picker down for another night between the rows.