I’m ready to help Charlie Hall and his boy, Les, harvest our wheat crop so the planting of this year’s soybean crop can begin by the end of the week.
Charlie Hall’s at the barn waiting for me.
I know he’s waiting for me because I can hear the music from the sound system he installed in here himself. It’s Hank Williams, of course, just because it’s mostly Hank with Charlie Hall:
Move over, little dog, ’cause the big dog’s moving in.
I stand in the barn doorway, knowing he hasn’t seen me yet, waiting for the song to end.
When it does, I say, “You know, there’s been a few other good singers since your guy Hank bought the farm, so to speak, about nine hundred years ago.”
“Not for me there haven’t been,” he says.
He spits some tobacco juice and grins at me, just a slight crinkling around his eyes. Charlie Hall’s face has always reminded me of worn-in leather from one of my old baseball gloves. He is, in all ways, a real beaut.
“Bring it in, big dog,” he says, and opens up his arms.
I walk over and we briefly hug it out. Even more than some coaches I’ve had along the way, and college professors, Charlie is the closest thing I’ve had to a father figure since my own father died.
He’s careful with the hug, I can tell, like he’s afraid I might break.
“Which parts hurt the most?” he asks.
“Only the broke ones.”
When he steps back, he says, “What I hear from your grandma, might be easier for me to know which partsain’tbroke.”
“I’m okay.”
He takes one more step back and squints at me from underneath an old John Deere ball cap that’s been on top of his head for as long as I’ve known him. Then he nods and says, “You ready to work?”
“Like a dog,” I say.
“Gotta want it,” Charlie says.
“More like I need it right now.”
I could explain to Charlie Hall just how much I need the work, but probably couldn’t make him understand it.
SEVENTEEN
BY NOW I know the drill, having worked with Charlie some when I was in high school, back when I’d use farmwork to help me get in shape for football season.
EJ owns two combine harvesters. With one of them in the shop, we focus our day on the grind of getting to the grain elevators and back.
Eventually Charlie and Les and me will be loading sixty-pound bags of seed into the back of our planter, laying down what will be the neatest rows of soybean plants ever seen in Watauga County. I’ve had football coaches who didn’t attend to—or maybe obsess over—the smallest details the way Charlie Hall does. One of the reasons we get along as well as we do.
He and I take our turns driving the combine. He goes first, and I watch how precise he is setting his rows, almost like a surgeon. The wheat stubble provides him with a road map, Charlie taking his time, never gunning the engine or speeding it up, his intense focus spitting off him like seeds, totally oblivious to the high heat of the day. Like this is his playing field, and he’s the star of it and just get the hell out of his way.
When it’s my turn, when I’m the one up in the driver’s seat, getting back up behind the wheel of the combine he’d taught me to drive back in high school even before I had my driver’s license, I’m almost surprised at how good it feels, as if I’m at least in charge of something again.
I throw myself into the work today, but with every wrong move, my bad shoulder stabs with pain so powerful I just have to sit there until it passes, almost like a wave of nausea. If Charlie notices, he doesn’t say anything, at least not until we finally call it a day.
“You gonna be okay to load those seed bags when the time comes?” he asks. “You know how heavy those suckers are.”
I give him a good, long look then, like I’m still surveying the other team’s defense right before the ball is snapped.
“Uncle Charlie,” I finally say in a soft voice. “I ever come up on work I can’t do, you’ll be the first to know, I promise.”
