When Elaine showed him the cracked windshield on Monday afternoon, Jeff didn’t know it was only the first straw.
“I was over as far as I could get without sliding into the ditch,” Elaine said when she came home with their son from playschool graduation and Jeff inspected the shiny new crack that zagged from one side of the glass to the other, right at the driver’s eye level. “What could I do?”
Jeff bit his tongue and left for the field quickly, before he asked her exactly how fast she’d been driving when she met that semi on the gravel road, and before he could also ask why on earth she needed to drive a foreign SUV when everybody knew the replacement windshields were $800 a pop.
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Jeff suspected it wouldn’t have happened if he’d been driving, but he could hardly bring that up, seeing that he’d skipped playschool graduation to get the last of the wheat seeded.
“We’ll have to take it in and get a new windshield,” Jeff said. “We can’t drive it like that.”
On Tuesday it was the sprayer. Jeff answered his father, Dale’s call for help and rushed out to the field, where he found Dale looking like a duck that had crawled out of the Gulf of Mexico. Dale was covered in oil from cap to boot, and the hydraulic hoses were still spraying oil two feet in every direction.
This could have happened to anyone. But Jeff couldn’t help but notice that it hadn’t happened to him. Jeff made his father take off his jeans and shirt before he got into the truck to go home for tools.
On Wednesday it was the lawn mower. Elaine was half-finished with the front lawn when it quit running. Jeff had been meaning to change the oil, but when Dale mentioned he might do it, Jeff had forgotten all about it. Jeff didn’t think he deserved all the blame for this, but he wasn’t completely in the clear. “First the $800 windshield. Then the sprayer. Now this,” Jeff muttered.
Thursday was the most expensive day. It should have been the last day of seeding, and when Jeff’s grandfather, Ed, came out from town to take his last turn at the wheel for the year, he brought his new girlfriend, Helen, along with him. “Get on in!” he’d told her, holding her cane while she eased her bad hip up the ladder and into the tractor cab. “Let me show you how it’s done!”
After a few minutes things seemed to be going well, so Jeff had gone back to the yard for more seed. Dale was in the yard too, and Ed and Helen were enjoying the summer scenery from the tractor cab, so there were no witnesses when the wheel rolled right off the air cart.
“Get out here!” Ed said over the phone. “We’ll need your truck to drive around and find the damn wheel. Good thing I made it to the corner on the dual.”
Jeff sighed.
“Bring some tools. And maybe the loader tractor. That auger’s really dragging on the ground.”
Jeff thought Dale had changed out those wheel bolts for some stronger ones. Dale thought Jeff had done it. Ed wasn’t taking any responsibility, which he made pretty clear when he said, “I don’t know what kind of show you guys are running. You’re just lucky Helen wasn’t hurt. I don’t know what she’s thinking about us. We’ll be lucky if she decides to stick around. Especially if you both keep cursing around her.”
Jeff spent half the day on the phone, trying to track down a replacement tire rim and some new bolts. He finally found what he needed, but someone had to go all the way to the factory to pick it up — a good five-hour drive from the farm.
“I’ll take Helen up to see the sights,” Ed said. “She’d probably like to see more of Saskatchewan. But you guys will have to put us up in a nice hotel for the night.”
On Friday morning Jeff’s mother, Donna had been at the wheel of the old grain truck, bringing it home from the field — since seeding was out of the question for a few days — when the truck brakes went. Luckily Donna realized what had happened before it was too late. She managed to roll to a stop on the road right in front of the Hansons’ yard.
“Good thing I didn’t meet someone at the corner,” she said. “I was going a pretty good clip.”
Jeff and his dad moved the truck into the shop, and got to work on the brakes. They spent more time under the truck than they had in a while. One thing led to another until they had a list of seven or eight things that needed fixing before they could feel good about taking the truck out on the road again.
“I didn’t know this thing was in such bad shape,” Dale said. “And how have we been running it without replacing those signal lights?
“Good thing Grandpa didn’t see this,” Jeff said, mentally adding up how much all of this would cost.
“Time for a break,” Elaine said when she came out late in the morning and dragged Jeff into the house. “Have a shower, then we’ll go to town. We’ll have some lunch and pick up Conner.”
Jeff agreed. They needed to look at lawn mowers before the yard was completely overgrown anyway.
Elaine was right. It was a nice break. After they wrote a cheque for a new mower, Jeff and Elaine ate pizza while the baby snored and drooled in her car seat on a third chair. Between interruptions from neighbours stopping by to take a look under the pink blanket, Elaine had a chance to tell Jeff about a conference call she’d been on earlier in the week. Jeff told Elaine how Helen had packed Ed a picnic to take to the field. “In one of those wicker baskets! Like in those old Yogi Bear cartoons! Grandpa talks like he’s worried she might change her mind, but she’s not going anywhere.”
After lunch, they picked Conner up from his last day of preschool. The little boy was thrilled to see Jeff. “This is my daddy!” he told the playschool teacher, the receptionist, nine other kids and the janitor.
They stopped at the glass shop. The windshield on the SUV was already replaced, so Jeff went in to pay the bill while Elaine drove the kids home.
Jeff was already slowing down to turn into his yard when he met the semi. He pulled over as far as he could. The semi driver waved and grinned as they met. Then his trailer sent a stream of rocks up into the air.
“What’s that boy doing?” Ed asked Helen as they approached the yard, home with the new tire rim and bolts.
“Looks like some sort of dance,” Helen said, puzzled. But why is he jumping up and down in the middle of the road? Is he shouting something?”
Ed snorted. “Kid gets stranger every day. He’s yelling about ‘800.’”
Leeann Minogue is the editor of Grainews, a playwright and part of a family grain farm in southeastern Saskatchewan
