“How much?”
“One eighty.”
Silence.
The girl stared through the windshield.
“I know.”
Her mother said nothing.
“That hydraulic cylinder was going higher than we could afford anyway.”
Still nothing.
“I’ll pay it back.”
Her mother finally spoke.
“With what?”
The girl looked down at the steering wheel.
“I don’t know.”
Her mother glanced through the rear window at the crates.
“What are they?”
“Planter plates.”
“I gathered that.”
“Old mechanical planters use different plates depending on seed size.”
“I remember your grandfather changing them.”
The girl looked over.
“You do?”
“I remember him yelling because somebody put the wrong soybean plates back in the corn drawer.”
The girl almost smiled.
Her mother continued:
“You think these are worth something?”
“I think some might be.”
“How many?”
“I don’t know.”
Her mother sighed.
The girl waited for anger.
Instead:
“Then find out.”
That was all.
They drove home.
The farm lay six miles outside a small Iowa town.
Not large.
One hundred thirty acres owned.
Another eighty rented.
Corn.
Soybeans.
A little hay.
Twenty-four feeder cattle that belonged mostly to the bank if anyone wanted to be technically accurate.
The farm had survived three bad years by doing what many farms survived on.
Repairing things that should have been replaced.
Keeping machinery longer.
Trading labor with neighbors.
Using old buildings.
Borrowing money carefully.
Worrying constantly.
The girl had graduated high school the previous spring.
Most of her classmates scattered quickly.
Community college.
University.
Factories.
Military.
Marriage.
Cities.
She stayed.
Not because staying was romantic.
Her father’s back injury made climbing machinery difficult.
Her mother kept the books and managed livestock.
The girl increasingly ran field work.
People sometimes described her as helping on the farm.
She hated that phrase.
Nobody described her father as helping.
She drove tractors.
Rebuilt cultivator bearings.
Set planter depth.
Ran the combine.
Changed oil.
Pulled calves.
Calculated seed population.
Read markets badly.
Worried about rain professionally.
She was farming.
Still, because she was eighteen, female, and had a braid sticking out beneath a cowboy hat, older men often explained tools already in her hands.
Most of the time she tolerated it.
Sometimes she learned something.
Sometimes she wanted to throw a wrench.
That evening, she backed the trailer into her grandfather’s old machine shed.
The crates looked less impressive under one bare light bulb.
Not impressive at all.
Her father walked in slowly.
Back stiff.
He looked into the first crate.
Then at his daughter.
“One eighty?”
She nodded.
He lifted one plate.
“You bought rust.”
Her stomach sank.
Then he wiped the center clean.
His expression changed.
“Wait.”
The girl looked up.
He turned the plate.
“Your granddad had one like this.”
She moved closer.
“For what?”
“Old two-row planter.”
“Sweet corn, maybe.”
“You sure?”
“No.”
Her father looked at the other crates.
Then at her.
“You still have his books?”
The girl stared.
“Yes.”