He is only here in July

Wheat come off short. Thirty-one bushel on the section south of the house, and that's dryland. But thirty-one is short. Test weight was sixty-one, which is fine. Moisture was 11.8 the first morning, which is drier than you want. You can't pay a crew to sit and wait on a dew, either. Brewster was posting 5.02 Monday and 4.96 by Thursday. So that was the week.

Renfro's crew got in on the sixth. Four machines and the two semis. His trailer goes at the end of the drive by the pole so he can run a cord to it, same as it's gone since 2014, and the hands stay at the motel in Colby out on the highway.

Six days this year instead of nine. That's what thirty-one bushel does. He had a place at Imperial waiting on him after their regular outfit quit on them, so there wasn't any standing around.

My mother died in June of that first year and we buried her the second week of July. Wheat doesn't wait on that. Dale took the morning and I took the morning. Machines ran that afternoon. Renfro come up to the house that night to settle the acres and Deb had taken the girls to her sister's in Hays.

Nine days you're not fit to go until ten-thirty or eleven. You run till one or two in the morning if the humidity holds off. You unload on the go so nobody sits. Deb brings food down at suppertime, a roaster of something and a cooler, and the hands eat standing up in the turn row. I'm on the grain cart mostly now. Dale hauls.

Dale's two years up on me. He keeps the books and he keeps the shop. The ground's in both our names, it come down through our granddad, who put it together a quarter at a time starting in the forties. Dale's out here with me every other day there is. Him and Charlene are a mile and a half north.

Renfro's sixty-one. Chillicothe, Texas. He's got a wife down there and a boy that runs the second machine, twenty-six, real good on it, better than his dad on a point row. The boy calls me sir and I've asked him twice to quit.

Since the thing in 2021 I'm down about sixty pounds. They went in through the wrist and put two stents in and said they'd watch the other one. Renfro hadn't seen me since before that, and when he got down out of the machine that first morning he said it looked like somebody'd been at me with a knife, which they had. My shirts all still hang on me like they're my dad's.

I ran an open-station tractor from about fifteen until we got a cab in the nineties, and that's where the ear went. The aid whistles in the combine anyway so I mostly go without it and read what a man's mouth is doing.

The trailer's one of those thirty-two footers with the table that folds down. I take the aid out and set it on the shelf by the window, so if he says something with his back turned I have to ask him for it twice. What happens in there is what happens. The rest of it is the two of us at that little table with the fan going, him telling me what the elevator's doing down in Enid, and his knee.

That's the other thing he brought up. The outfits around here have got big enough to own their own machines, so the middle of his route is coming apart on him. He's thinking about selling two and running Oklahoma straight on up to Nebraska.

Thursday night Dale's pickup come down the drive. I heard it before I saw it, and the aid was on the shelf, but you feel a truck on that gravel. He stopped even with the trailer with the lights on it. He sat there a minute. Then he backed all the way up to the house and shut it off.

Friday morning he told me the co-op was closing at six on account of a man being out, so get the last two loads in ahead of that. That's all he said. That's all he's said.

Saturday they finished the northwest quarter around eleven at night and washed the machines down by the bins. I went down there after. He had the door propped because that unit won't cool with the door shut. He said he'd let me know about next year when he knew something. I said that's fine.

They pulled out Sunday around noon. Renfro settled up at the kitchen table and Deb poured him a coffee he didn't drink and made him take a pie, and he shook my hand in the drive with Dale standing right there holding the gate.

He left a three-eighths impact socket in the shop and a jug of orange hand cleaner that isn't the kind we buy. The socket's in the drawer with the rest of them.

Milo did better than the wheat. Eighty-eight bushel and we got it out the second week of October ahead of that wet stretch, and the basis was ugly, but the basis is always ugly. Deb and I had thirty-one years in August and we went to the Mexican place in Colby because that's where she wanted to go. Kayla's in Hays. Brynn's in Kansas City with the two boys, and the little one was out here at Thanksgiving and wouldn't get in the combine for anything.

The grass where the trailer sits stays yellow through the winter in that shape.

We're in the same pew we've been in, third from the back on the piano side.

In November Dale asked me were we going with Renfro again or did I want to try that outfit out of Hays, on account of they'd come down on price. I said Renfro. He said all right, and wrote it down.