I almost said something in 1988

Feeders were up a dollar ten Monday and gave most of it back by Thursday. Corn looks all right. We caught two and a tenth the last week of July and that's what carried it. Without that I'd have chopped the west eighty for silage and told everybody I meant to.

Cody does most of it now. He's twenty-six. He's got the Petersen quarter rented in his own name and runs it in with ours, and he's better on the marketing end than I ever was. We went in to Ord in March and put the home place in a trust with his name on it, which the lawyer said was the cheaper way of doing it.

I still do the cattle because I like them. Sixty head, you just walk out and look at them. The house is the one my grandad put up in nineteen and twenty-two and it's had one bathroom the whole time.

Right now the corn head's on stands in the shop with the deck plates off. Second row unit had a gearbox bearing go out last fall, maybe two hundred rounds from the end, and we finished on five rows. You can do that. You sit up there and watch that one row lay down in front of you and go under.

Cody pulled the unit this time instead of me. The bearing's forty-one dollars at the co-op and a whole gearbox if you go that way is eleven hundred. We're putting new gathering chains on all six while it's apart. You can run old chains, sure. They stretch and quit indexing right and then you're losing ears out the front where you can't see it happen, and come January you're looking at the scale tickets wondering where four bushel went.

Dale comes over about quarter to twelve. He's had the quarter straight across the section road since '79. He could be here in a minute if he came out his own drive and turned north, but he goes clear around the section the other way, four miles to come half a mile, because of his neck. Case went over on him in '94. He's never said one word about why he drives it that way and I've never asked him.

If you talk to him from the side he turns the whole of himself, boots and all, like a man coming around on a stool at the co-op.

Bev died in April. Marlys died four years ago in February, the eleventh, in that cold stretch where the pickup wouldn't start for nine days. Both lunches were in the same basement at St. Paul's and I'd guess the same ladies made the ham buns for both.

He started coming over about a week after. Four days most weeks, five some weeks. I don't cook. It's sandwiches, or there's chili in the can. Thursdays I'll do hamburgers because there's still a steer in the freezer from a year ago March.

He sits on a five-gallon bucket in the shop while Cody works and tells him what he's doing wrong, which Cody takes better than I'd have took it at that age.

We put up hay together every year from '80 on, his baler and my rake, and split the diesel down the middle without either one of us writing any of it down. He's got four years on me.

In August of '88 it didn't rain. Pastures were done by the Fourth. We hauled water in a tank on a flatbed and I about wore out a transmission doing it, and Dad put a clutch in it that fall he couldn't hardly afford. The dam in the northeast went to cracked mud and you could walk out in the middle of it in your good shoes.

We were in my dad's truck that day, the green Ford. Radio quit in '81 and nobody ever put another one in. We'd come down the field road along the north side of the corn to look at fence where the cattle were going to go, and I got to the end of it and stopped and shut it off.

Corn was rolled up tight as a pencil. Hundred and one that day. I know because the sign at the co-op said so when we went through town.

I said, Dale, I've been —

He didn't say anything. There was a fly in there with us working at the windshield.

Then I said something about the water gap being down on the south end, and he said he had pliers behind the seat, and we started her up and went and moved forty-some pairs in that heat. One old cow wouldn't go. We left her and got her the next morning and she'd got herself into the shade along the draw.

I don't know what was coming after I've been. Might have been nothing at all.

His hands went about ten years back. The knuckles are all knots and the two fingers on the right don't come all the way down anymore. He can't get a lid off. First time he came over after Bev he sat there working at the pickle jar and I didn't notice for a minute, and then I did, and I took it off him and opened it and set it down.

Cody was standing at the counter when it happened. He didn't say anything then.

Now Cody comes in before Dale's truck is even up the drive. He cracks the lid on whatever's going on the table and sets it back down so it looks closed. Pickles, and the jelly if there's toast. Then he goes straight back out to the shop like he never came through. He eats his lunch here too.

Since April we've had lunch here better than a hundred times. We've done the price of steel and whether the Jorgensen place will finally sell and to who. His neck came up the one time, sideways, when he wanted to know did I think a man ought to have another mirror put on the passenger side.

Tuesday of last week Cody went to Broken Bow after chain and it was just the two of us in the shop. Neither one of us said anything for close to twenty minutes. Then Dale said that bearing was probably made in India. I said it probably was. Cody got back with the chain a little after four.