The phone didn’t ring.
On the ninth of May, it rained two inches.
On the twelfth, a Tuesday, I came over the hill with eight tons of dry fertilizer behind me. And there was a sixteen-row planter in the pivot quarter. Behind a tractor I didn’t know. With a pickup and a seed trailer parked at the end rows.
The pickup had Kansas plates.
Three days after two inches of rain. On that ground.
I slowed down.
I could see the shine in the tracks behind the planter, where the wheels were smearing the soil instead of crumbling it. I could see mud packing up on the gauge wheels. They were mudding it in.
Any man raised on that quarter could have told them to wait until Friday.
I could have turned in at the lane. I had my hand on the blinker.
Then I thought: he hired them.
