COMING SOON!
CHAPTER 1
TUESDAY SEPTEMBER 16TH
It is 4:40 a.m.
Sunrise is still two hours away.
Although the night sky is clear and the stars shine in the pre-dawn darkness, the floodlights near the barn and the kitchen light in the Sauer house are the only warm glow in the valley, drawing the eye toward the kitchen where Marianne stands inside.
Marianne is at the counter, with twelve pieces of white bread in neat rows.
Orderly rows are everywhere in the dairy farmer’s life.
Rows of milking machines.
Rows of feeding troughs.
Rows of fencing.
Rows of corn, ready to be cut for silage feed.
It’s hard work, the farmer’s life.
But it’s a good life. At least Emmett thinks so.
Marianne feels that way too.
She could have been an engineer, a veterinarian, or a doctor, but she would not trade this life for any of those paths. There is something about the rhythms of the farm, the work that asks for patience and earns its own quiet reward, that feels more like purpose than sacrifice.
They say, “Find what you love, and never work a day in your life.” She knows that to be true.
CHAPTER 2
TUESDAY EVENING
The dispatcher wants to know if the patient is breathing.
Emmett is standing in the middle of the field with the phone pressed to his ear and the machine dead and silent behind him, and he says, “No.”
She asks him to confirm that the patient is not breathing.
“Ma’am, there is no patient.” And then, barely a whisper: “My boy is — he’s gone.”
She keeps him on the line.
She is just doing her job, so she asks him three more times to check, and he does not move to check, because there is nothing left to check.
She stops asking.
She tells him somebody is on the way.
She says, “Stay where you are.”
She calls him Mr. Sauer. She has it off the address on her screen, and she uses it four times, and it is the last time all evening that anybody says his last name out loud.
He stays.
It takes the first squad eighteen minutes.
In those eighteen minutes, he does not move and does not sit down and does not look in the wagon, and does not look away from it either.
The wind pulls across the fields from the northwest and rustles the standing corn. A mile off at the home place, Alvin Prahl’s loader keeps backing and turning.
Then it stops.
Alvin has looked up and counted the time passing and worked out that the next load hasn’t shown up.
He cannot see this field from where he is sitting. All he has is arithmetic — eleven minutes to fill a wagon and twenty-six to bring it over and dump it and bring the empty back — and the arithmetic has quit coming out right.
He does not get in the truck.
That is the first kindness anybody does for Emmett Sauer that day, and he is not going to understand that it was one until Wednesday afternoon.
At four forty-seven, the phone vibrates in his shirt pocket.
He takes it out. It is Marianne.
She has heard the machine stop.
She has heard it running all hours of the day, for many years, and she knows the sound of the harvester quitting at the end of a row, and she knows the sound of it dying in the middle of one.
She has been standing at the kitchen sink for way too long now, waiting for it to start again.
“Why won’t he pick up the damn phone?” she quietly asks no one in particular.
CHAPTER 3
WEDNESDAY
By noon, there is more food in the house than the two of them will eat in a month.
It comes the way it comes.
A car pulls into the yard, and somebody gets out with a roaster or a nine-by-thirteen under foil. They do not come to the door. They set it on the step, knock twice, and are back down the walk and into the car before anybody inside has to put a face on and come say something.
That is not coldness. It is the opposite of coldness, and every person in this valley learned it the same way, which is by having it done for them once.
There are eleven pans on the counter and two in the entry, and the freezer is full, and none of them are labeled with anything except masking tape and a first name.
Marianne stacks them. That is what she does most of the day. She stacks them and reads the tape and gets out the chest freezer inventory sheet she has kept since 1998 and writes each one down in her small square hand, because a thing that goes into a freezer without a date on it is a thing that gets thrown out in two years, and she is not going to throw out anybody’s kindness.
It is the only job in the house that has a beginning and an end, and she does it four times.
There is a pan of scalloped potatoes from Arla Sedlak.
Emmett knows whose handwriting it is before he reads the tape.
He stands looking at it longer than he means to.
Dell hated scalloped potatoes.
Not disliked. Hated.
At fourteen, he attended three funerals in one summer — a great-uncle, a neighbor, and a man from church whose name nobody in the family could ever afterward recall — and he ate around the scalloped potatoes at every one of them, and afterward, in the truck, he explained to his father that death did not improve potatoes.
Marianne laughed so hard she had to put a hand on the counter.
Dell spent two weeks pleased with himself over it. He worked that line into three more conversations, and it got worse every time, the way a boy’s material does.
Emmett remembers the laugh before he remembers the potatoes.
Then Marianne picks the pan up and finds a place for it in the freezer, and the moment is gone, and neither of them says anything about it, and this is going to happen to both of them about nine times a day for the next year.
At some point in the morning, there is a glove on the step.
Not with a pan. By itself, folded once, set square in the middle of the concrete where a man could not walk past it without seeing it.
Nobody knocked. Nobody says anything about it, that day or any other day, and Emmett never does learn which of them went out into that field in the dark and picked it up and thought about it the whole way up the field road, and decided that the step was better than the hand.
He brings it in and puts it on the shelf inside the entry door, above the boot tray.
That is where it stays.
At four, he goes out to do chores.
The hens are shut in and watered. The goats have hay. There is fresh bedding in the gelding’s run, and the water tank is full and skimmed of chaff.
All of it was done in the last two hours, and Emmett did not do it.
He walks down to the parlor.
Ninety-one cows have been milked. The lines are washed, the receiver jar is clean and drained, the bulk tank is running and reading what it should for one milking, and the alley is scraped. Somebody has swept the step-up, which nobody ever does. Somebody has also turned the fan at the west end around, because it has been blowing wrong since August, and Emmett has been meaning to get to it since August.
He stands in the middle of it.
There is not one thing in that building for him to do.
He knows who. It will have been the Vosbergs and Alvin and probably Larry Sedlak on the vacuum pump, because Larry is the only man left in this township who knows that pump, and none of them will ever mention it, and if he tries to thank them they will look at their boots and change the subject, and this is how it is done here and he has done it for other people four times in his life.
