Elaine didn’t know her iPhone was almost dead until she pulled it out to check the time. It was nearly four. She stopped the tractor while she rummaged through her pockets and the backpack she’d brought out to the tractor with her. No luck. She’d forgotten her charger. She took a look under the buddy seat, but her father-in-law Dale, hadn’t left a charger in the cab.
Her iPhone battery quit completely as she was putting the tractor back in gear. Oh well, Elaine thought. She didn’t need to call anyone. Her kids would be fine with her mother-in-law Donna for the rest of the afternoon and Dale had promised to take over for her before six, so Elaine could take Connor to town for soccer practice. She knew she could rely on Dale to show up on time, even though he’d muttered something about “kids today,” and how he sure didn’t remember being driven to town to chase balls in the middle of seeding when he was young.
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Elaine settled back into her routine of scouting for rocks, gathering them into the rockpicker on the front of the tractor, then loading them into a pile on the edge of the field so they’d be out of the way when the Hansons were harvesting the lentils they’d seeded in this field.
This seeding season was a little different for the Hansons. Since his stroke, Elaine’s grandfather-in-law Ed couldn’t do most of the jobs he’d usually done. He still drove out from town every day, but now he was demoted to helping move trucks around.
Elaine’s father-in-law Dale Hanson was doing his best to keep out of the air seeder. Last year he’d left a long unseeded strip right beside the main road. It had shaken his confidence to the point where, this year, he would only get in the cab when he absolutely had to. Luckily, their new employee Mark, had turned out to be a pretty capable sprayer operator. That left Elaine’s husband Jeff spending long days running the air drill, with Dale and Elaine keeping the drill filled and using the smaller tractor to run the rockpicker.
Donna looked after Elaine’s three-year-old daughter Jenny, cooked for everyone, ran for parts, and waited in the yard at 4:15 on weekdays to greet Elaine’s first-grader, Connor, when he got off the school bus.
The grass in the yard was already out of control, so anyone with any free time would pull out the mower to reclaim a patch of lawn.
It was so busy, the only time Elaine really had to think was when she was running the rockpicker.
Yesterday, she’d thought too much. She’d phoned her sister. “Do you think anyone would hire me?”
“Don’t you have enough to do?” her sister asked. “When would you have time for a job?”
“I don’t want to have a job. I want to know I could get a job,” Elaine said. “A real job. With co-workers and lunch breaks.” Then she looked down at the ratty sneakers she was wearing. “And nice shoes.”
“It’s your own fault you don’t wear nice shoes,” her fashion-conscious sister said.
“I should get a job where I could use my skills. Anybody could drive this tractor around looking for rocks. The dog could do it. I didn’t go to university to do this all day.”
“If you hadn’t gone to university, you wouldn’t have met Jeff. And we both know you’re very good at all the things you’re doing. Download some podcasts and quit thinking so much while you’re in that tractor,” her sister said.
Today, with her phone dead, Elaine couldn’t call her sister.
“Maybe I should run as a board member on a farm group,” she thought. “But it’s such a long drive to Saskatoon. Why do they have to meet in Saskatoon?”
She picked up one last rock before the tractor came to a halt.
She jolted.
And that’s when she looked at the fuel gauge. Empty.
She hadn’t thought to check.
“I should’ve got the dog to do this. Buddy would’ve checked the gauges,” Elaine berated herself.
She was about to call Ed for a ride, when she remembered her dead phone. She looked at the empty spot in the cab where the Hansons had once hung FM radios. “No point keeping these around, now that everybody has a phone,” Jeff had said last summer.
Of course she was almost exactly in the middle of a quarter section, as far as possible from the nearest road, which was really more like a trail. If nobody came along, she’d have to walk three miles to the main road. From there, she could probably hitch a ride for the four miles back to the farm.
“At least I’m wearing comfortable shoes,” she sighed.
She grabbed her backpack and started off.
It didn’t take her long to trek to the edge of the field. From there, she walked about two-thirds of the way to the road before Brian Miller’s blue truck pulled up beside her. Elaine groaned. “Everybody within 30 miles will hear about how dumb I am before we get the tractor filled,” she thought.
Soon she was on her way out to the field again with her father-in-law, in the truck with the fuel tank in the back.
“I should’ve checked the gauge,” Elaine told Dale. “I’m such a moron.”
“We all should’ve kept an eye,” Dale said. “Ed used to keep everything filled with fuel. We didn’t realize how much he was doing, before he got sick.”
Dale told Elaine to get in the cab while they bled the fuel lines. “You turn the key. I’ll open the bleed screws,” he said.
“I’ll take the dirty job,” Elaine said. “It’s my fault we’re here, so I might as well learn something. Show me what to do.”
Twenty minutes later, the lines were bled, and Elaine was soaked.
“You taking a shower?” Dale asked when he came down from the cab.
“Very funny,” she said. “The diesel came out the line a lot faster than I thought it would. It’s all over me.”
Dale almost managed not to laugh. Then he checked his watch. “You better get going if you’re going to wash the diesel off you and get Connor to town in time for soccer.”
Elaine rushed to the yard to change, feed herself and the kids, and drive to town to the soccer pitch.
The coach wasn’t there. “Out seeding,” the other parents said. Elaine filled in.
After 30 minutes of drills and exercises, Elaine coached Connor’s team to victory, if “victory” can be counted as having the most six-year-olds paying attention to the game. Connor scored a goal when three of the kids on the other team bent over to examine a caterpillar.
“How do you manage it all?” one of the other moms asked her after the game.
Elaine shook her head. “You don’t know the half of it.”
“You do so much on the farm, and with those kids. And I wanted to tell you,” the mom went on. “I really like your shoes.” Then she looked around, sniffing. “But what’s that smell?”
