The night before the funeral, Jason walked into the kitchen to find the brothers around the table. Mom stood at the sink, her back to them. She seemed smaller than usual in the waning glow from the overhead light. They all tower over her, the Harder men — even Jason is a head taller — but she never seems short, exactly; she has a way of bringing your eyes down to her, a directness that could make a high priest squirm. She was washing jars in steaming water; the women were going to can green beans and tomatoes the next day.
Dad was saying, “But I bought it, Dean. How’s that supposed to count against me here?” Dean stared at a point between his long, thickly knuckled hands, splayed on the table before him. The skin around his eyes had tightened whitely. Roy winked at Jason.
Jason opened the fridge and scouted, waiting for them to resume talking. He grabbed a Tupperware bowl, opened it, and looked at a lump of leftover ground beef. The hamburger looked like volcanic rock, a solid created from a liquid’s lack of geometric logic. At his back, a fingernail ticked on the laminate tabletop. He imagined a tiny mountain climber rappelling down Hamburger Mountain into a greasy white crevasse. Dad said, “Jason, you’re letting out all the cold air.”
“It’s not like there’s only so much cold air,” Jason said. “Like there’s only a certain amount of cold, and you’ve got to keep it trapped in there, like bees.”
He could be so stupid. Jason thought he was going to choke on it.
Roy laughed. “He’s making a certain kind of sense, Louis.”
“Thank you, son,” Dad said, ignoring Roy. “Now clear out of here and let us talk.”
“Talk. Please.”
Mom turned, holding a gleaming, soapy jar. “I don’t know where all this mouth is coming from,” she said. “But that’s enough.”
Jason closed the fridge door and sauntered out, steaming. He couldn’t believe they were fighting over this place. Who would ever want to be here?
• • •
They move into the last field, the fifty acres between Grandpa’s house and Shoestring Road. Some of these final windrows are barely even there. This is where the jacks had hit a few weeks earlier, gnawing half the hay into bare patches and paths swirling through the field like the scribbling of a giant.
Dad stops the combine and climbs out. Shakes his head. A sudden rustling at the edge of the field startles Jason. A single jackrabbit springs into the air, long ears back, bounding into the desert in ten-foot leaps. Boyd points an imaginary gun and says, “Boom.”
Later that afternoon, when they’re halfway through the field, the end in sight, Dean comes striding through the stubble, raising a low cloud. Jason sits in the sweltering, oil-rank cab of the combine, engine roaring in an obliterating drone. Dad follows in the truck, while Boyd bucks bales onto the flatbed. Everyone stops and watches Dean. He doesn’t wave, and they don’t, either, and when he reaches them, a few strained, silent seconds pass.
Finally, Dean says something, and Dad shrugs and gestures toward the rumbling cab, or toward Jason. He’s come to help, it seems, though they are all but done. Jason turns off the engine, and Dad calls, “Whyn’t you let your uncle Dean up there for a minute?”
Dean climbs in and nods, says, “Jason.” His denim shirt is buttoned to the neck, darkened with sweat at the collar, and he wears a green John Deere cap with a stiff bill. He smells sour and fundamental, like homemade soap and tent canvas. He looks around, at the pedals and the gearshift and back at the pedals. The sun illuminates the calcified grime on the cab windows. He turns the key and the engine bursts into life.
“Gotta watch that clutch,” Jason shouts.
“I don’t require any instruction from you.”
Dean might be teasing. He presses the clutch, forces the gearshift into first, and eases his foot down on the gas. The gearshift begins to grind and vibrate and his foot slips off. The engine chugs and dies.
“Well, Judas Priest,” Dean says.
He twists the key, presses the clutch, and tries again. This time the baler lurches forward, coughs, and dies. Jason feels testy, impatient; they are so close to done. Dean stamps his foot and mutters.
He tries again. It chugs and dies.
“You know…” Jason says.
Dean points toward Jason sideways, without looking up, like a prophet banishing a demon. “Do not!” he spits.
Dad and Boyd watch from the ground, shading their eyes. Dad calls, “Maybe you ought to let Jason show you.”
“Louis!” Dean shouts, and Jason hears the tone of an older brother. “I do not need instructions from a boy in how to operate a simple piece of machinery. I think if you maintained your equipment properly, we wouldn’t be having this problem. This clutch is slipping all over the place.”
Jason looks out and catches Boyd’s eye. He smiles.
“That is a bear of a clutch, Mr. Harder,” Boyd says.
Dean stares at Boyd, breathing slowly and deeply. Then he reaches for the key again and turns it, slowly lifting his foot from the clutch. This time, he fails to give it enough gas, and it sputters out weakly.
Dean spins in the seat and climbs down and stalks off across the field toward Grandpa’s.
Dad calls after him, “Dean! Heaven’s sake,” but Dean keeps marching into the sun until he’s a shadow again, and they go back to work.
• • •
They finish haying, and Jason takes the minibike out to the barley fields to move the irrigation pipes. Finished haying forever, he thinks, and soon, once this barley is cut, he’ll be through with that forever, too — through moving pipe, through choking on hay dust, through picking rock, through milking cows, through. He is thinking about buying an eight-track player for the LeBaron, like the one he saw in Roy’s Nova. It hung under the dash, a squat mechanical face with silver knobs for eyes and an inch of plastic case sticking out like a tongue. “New Zappa,” Roy had said, turning it up. Jason had no idea what he meant by that. Was it a code? A language? The music was strange and plinky, moving in uneven time. Roy tapped the steering wheel, and sang along, horrendously: “‘Watch out where the huskies go, and don’t you eat that yellow snow.’”
Jason wrings the gas, pushes the bike to top speed — thirty-three miles an hour. It is nearly sundown, a burning indigo along the black edge of the horizon. When he asked Roy how much the eight-track player cost, Roy answered, “Think your old man will let you have one?” Jason shrugged, and Roy said, “Sixty bucks or so.” Sprinklers on hand lines go chk-chk-chk in the barley, beside the parched, stubbled hay fields. Jason’s got sixty bucks. There’s still $134 in his savings account. He could put the player in the LeBaron and his parents probably wouldn’t even notice.
He rides through a cloud of cooled air, comes over the rise, and approaches Grandpa’s house, and standing in the yard is a girl or young woman, her back to Jason, a smooth drape of long brown hair squared upon the white of her blouse and her ankle-length dress. He has no idea who she is. She is pinning a shirt by the shoulders to the laundry line, one of Dean’s white shirts, and Jason wonders if all these people do is hang laundry, and then he is past her. A worm of nervous excitement moves through his guts, though there can be no good reason. What could he see? Nothing. Hair, a dress, the back of a head. A bending motion, like nodding barley. Nothing. And yet he feels it — girl nervousness, the anxiety of the suitor.
They eat a late dinner. Dad glumly answers Mom’s peppy questions, about the harvest, the yield, the jackrabbits. He nods as she tells him all about her plans for Jason, now that his senior year is beginning — scholarships and grants, college opportunities. She has somehow gotten it into her head that he will study agriculture, become the educated farmer, though he has lately thought he will study architecture, for no reason other than the impressive sound of it. She considers how he will work his mission around his college. Mom finally stops talking, and Dad sighs, staring at the lump of cheesy hamburger casserole on his plate. It is odd that he has not gulped it down and spooned up more. The plain, heavy silence infects Jason with an unfocused urge. He will definitely buy an eight-track player for the LeBaron. And maybe that New Zappa, too. Who cares if they catch him?