When the yield monitor finally read the average for the pivot, he looked at it for a long time.
“That forty-four bushels,” he said, “is what my pride cost.”
Then he took out Dad’s green notebook and wrote the number down himself. In ink. With the date.
He came out the last week of April this year.
He took a week of vacation to do it.
I set the planter. I checked the thermometer on the nail in the shop. Seven in the morning, three days running. Fifty degrees.
Then I put my brother in the tractor seat on the home quarter. And I stood on the step beside him for the first round. The same way Dad stood beside me when I was eleven years old.
He planted it straight.
A man with satellite guidance ought to plant straight, and I told him so. He said he’d take it anyway.
