Rain or Shine

Heat makes the ground bend when you’re 6 and eye level with stalks of corn blistering in July beams. Hunger is hunger whether you’re 7 or 29.

I learned from a very young age that food comes from the grocery store, you need money to bring it home, but it isn’t made there.

Bonfires warm up cans of beans if you can balance them on a pitchfork over the flames. A cow can survive a fall out of a trailer, roll down a highway hill, and still be dragged to slaughter. We just had to keep it alive long enough to get it there. The slaughterhouse wouldn’t take an already dead cow.

Combine fires are the sun in the middle of a wheat field orbit, and the flames melting orange cream into stalks of gold would be beautiful if your uncle wasn’t driving.

When you’re pulling a chisel plow in a muddy field you have to lift the plow a tad in the muddy parts, otherwise you’ll get stuck; when you call grandma she’ll panic and pace around the house until you call to tell her you learned the trick. We sat around the pond that night where I was inducted into the circle of accomplishing the seemingly impossible.

From the cab of the tractor, all eight of the 6’ tires were caked to the tips of the treads with mud. I was making my 287th loop in the field beside the farm, a.k.a. grandma and grandpa’s house. I counted, at least, being this close as a blessing while black smoke churned from the exhaust pipe sticking up out of the center of the IH red, long nose hood of the tractor. All eight of my hundred pound tires spun, slick with wet, black mud. The soil is mostly clay on our farm by Lake Erie. If you’ve ever taken a pottery class you know the slick of wet clay in your hands. I may as well have sprayed the bottom of each tire with industrial nonstick spray and climbed on the metal sled behind Clark Griswald, except this wasn’t the Christmas movie my husband and I watch while desperately wrapping a living room full of presents at 1 AM on Christmas Eve for our daughters. This was a “several hundred, thousand dollars worth of machinery becoming compromised, and a sizeable portion of tillable acres being rutted and thus compromised beneath me,” on a hot, June afternoon.

I was 14, and had only been driving tractor by myself for a few years. I recently learned that my brother was 9 the first time he drove the planter. It was no anomaly that we were equipped to contribute to the farm’s productivity at these ages. We’d been doing other various labors all our life.

January 14, 2015: our third wedding anniversary.

“I just can’t do this anymore,” he said.

I’d heard this before. We’d exchanged similar sentiments for years.

“I can’t either,” I replied.

“I just don’t trust you.”

Our bedroom, once a sanctuary, had become a place of solemnity. Across the hall our toddler played in her bedroom, and the various electronic music of little girl toys chimed through the monitor. She chattered something illegible while we stood staring at one another, held fast along a tightrope of tension and her Build-a-Bear teddy Elsa began singing “Let it Go.”

“I don’t trust you, either,” I agreed.

“What do we do now?” he asked.

The hurt in his eyes stabbed into my sternum. Just because he couldn't mask how he felt as well as I could didn’t mean that I wasn’t hurting too. For a moment it made me angry. I knew his openness would manipulate everyone closest to us, innocently or not, while my silence would convict me.

“I don’t know.”

I had answered honestly. I really didn’t know. We’d reached this place in our marriage before. Part of me wanted to see if he’d actually act on the threats he made to leave. At a certain point one and then both of us stopped coming back from the fights that ripped the silence, and tore into the most vulnerable places we had. Knowing someone as intimately as we knew one another meant we knew the most tender places, and exactly where to stab. We took turns wielding various swords at one another, drawing blood, but once we laid the swords down we shifted into the role of medic. Lovingly bandaging, and deeply regretting having been the cause of the spilled blood. We didn’t need any more bloodshed. We’d been at this for years. It was time to let it go.

He’d moved to the closet, and pulled a suitcase from it. A vice gripped my chest.

“You don’t have to do that.”

My voice pitched, and tightened as I watched him pull his folded white t-shirts and boxer briefs from his top dresser drawers.

“I kind of do.”

He paused to make eye contact with me. I couldn’t discern if this was real, if he’d really go, and if he did, for how long? We were like bungee cords stretching one another to our furthest point only to be jerked back together. The truth was that neither of us wanted this, and we both knew it. We both wanted the other to fess up, to change the things we thought the other needed to change in order to make this work.

He finished unpacking the top drawer, and moved to the second drawer. He pulled a stack of t-shirts out, and moved to put them in his suitcase. My end bungeed back first. I couldn’t handle watching his Jurassic Park tee be packed away. I loved this dinosaur-obsessed father of my child.

“No, don’t. Please, don’t.” I shook my head.

He hesitated with the t-shirts in mid air, halfway between his suitcase and the dresser.

“Please unpack that thing. This is ridiculous. Neither of us want this.”

I saw his resolve weaken. I knew he didn’t want to go. My fear morphed as I tried to decide if he’d just been manipulating me. If he was, I decided not to address it now. We had to make dinner, and get Rae in the bath, read her bedtime stories, and then snuggle her for bedtime. I took her down to help me make dinner while he unpacked his things.

“We both have to make changes.”

One of us had said it, but we both agreed it was true. What we were currently doing wasn’t working.

2004

I yanked the throttle down from where gramps had drawn a rabbit at the top toward the hand drawn turtle at the bottom to slow the engine, pushed in the clutch, and dropped the engine into low, while pushing back up the throttle and praying I’d ease forward. Black, black smoke chugged from the exhaust. The side by side tires to my left and right ground down into the earth like a mule planting its feet.

“Shit.”

I hit the top of the steering wheel with my right hand. Sorry, God. I knew swearing was bad, but if no one was around to hear it, was it still a sin? Please, please just let me get this thing out and I’ll never swear again. I took a deep breath, hoping God was able to peer down at me for a moment and harden the earth below me so I could move forward.

I decided to try second gear low instead of first low. I dropped the throttle again to ease the clutch into the higher gear. I slowly tapped the throttle closer to the rabbit with my palm, and the engine churned louder with each budge north. This is it, okay, this is going to be fine, I tried to reassure myself. I gave the throttle one last bump while releasing the clutch. The tractor threw itself against the plow. I rocked forward in my seat, “come on,” I yelled into the roar of the engine. Coal black puffs rippled out of the exhaust pipe in expanding mounds. The engine screamed, and I backed off the throttle in defeat. I pushed in the clutch, and shifted down into neutral. There was no use.

I was driving a 1967 Steiger, eight wheel, international harvester. I was in the biggest tractor on our farm. There wasn’t any other machine that could pull me out. I imagined the ground opening up to swallow me, the tractor, and the plow whole and sinking down into a deep, clay filled pit of failure. I had to call the farm. No one was there to answer beside grandma. I laughed out loud at the ludicrous image of her driving back through the field in her chrysler with chains and hooks to pull me free. She agreed that all she could do was try to get ahold of grandpa. I’d just sit here in my shame until someone could come help.

I was too far from the woods for a winch. There wasn’t one on the front of this tractor, anyway. I doubted that anyone had ever gotten stuck in it to the extent that they needed one. What can they even bring? I wondered. Maybe the combine? I put my forehead against the steering wheel. Pulling gramps away from the planter now meant the field he was working in wouldn’t be done before dark, meaning the field he needed to get to in the morning wouldn’t get got to until tomorrow afternoon, and so on and so forth, and it’s a constant race against the rain. Every minute, every acre counts.

I sat up in my seat, and sat back. It was starting to get hot in the cab with no breeze coming in. I might as well wait out in the field, I decided. I hadn’t gotten out to check the plow, I also realized. I pulled up on the lever that releases the plow, lifts, and folds it to store in the shed or for when it’s being pulled down the road.

The plow lifted easily from where it had been plunged, dragging through the wet, heavy earth and pulling hard against the tractor. When it reached fully lifted status, balancing on the tires, the machine surged forward a inch.

I decided to try again. I felt lighter in my seat. I hadn’t even thought to try releasing the weight of the plow from behind the tractor. I pulled the hydraulic line one last time to ensure the plow was lifted fully. I shifted down into first low, and tapped the throttle back toward the bunny with the plow now lifted behind me. I moved forward as if I’d never been stuck, and whooped in relief as I drove out of the quicksand gooey patch in the center of the unbaked field.

2015

The fear from that fight lasted six months. We kept tapping our throttle up toward the bunny and back down toward the turtle, rocking forward and backward deepening the ruts without progressing forward, the weight behind us keeping us stuck. Except this time, I didn’t have a lever to lift, and no idea whatsoever what to do.