The day had started off well. “Daddy, the sun came out! I better stay home and help!” Connor said, looking out the open front door. Jeff looked out over his son’s head. After three days of mid-harvest rain, the sky had cleared.
“Looks good,” Jeff agreed. “But you can’t miss the first day. And it’ll take a few days for the fields to dry up. You got everything in your backpack?”
Connor unzipped it and admired his new John Deere lunchkit one more time as the yellow school bus pulled into the yard.
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“I got everything,” Connor said. “Do you promise to come get me if you need me here?”
“I will.” Jeff waved at the bus driver, then stood aside as Elaine ran out in her pyjamas to take a photo of her little boy getting on the bus. Then two-year-old Jenny passed Jeff, dragging her blanket behind her.
“I going school too,” she said.
“Oh no you’re not,” Jeff said, scooping her up and carrying her back in to the breakfast table, followed soon by Elaine, flipping through the photos on her phone.
“He’s getting so big,” she said.
“Me too,” said Jenny.
“It’s sweet, the way he wants to work on the farm,” Elaine said.
“That’s the way we want it,” Jeff said.
“What are you doing today?” Elaine asked.
“I don’t know. Maybe just sit here being thankful we got the combine fixed before the sun came out?”
The breakdown happened three days earlier. Heavy clouds had started to move in from the south when Jeff heard a sickening thud from the combine cab.
“What was that?” Connor asked from his perch on the buddy seat. The rotor shuddered to a halt and Jeff shut down the combine.
“I’m not sure,” Jeff said. “Let’s go down and take a look.”
This problem was beyond an in-field fix. Connor and Jeff made the sad trek back to the yard just as it started to rain.
“Never seen barbed wire wrapped up so tight,” Jeff’s grandfather Ed said, helpfully, once they had the machine in the shop and Jeff and his father Dale opened the side panels and started pulling the concaves out.
Unwrapping the wire took the men most of the day.
“Never seen concaves smashed up like that,” Jeff’s father Dale said the next morning. “We’re going to need to replace them.”
That afternoon, Dale went to town for replacement concaves.
“Just sold the last ones,” said the parts man at the dealership. “You could try Regina.”
While Dale drove off, Mark, who by this time had been working on the Hanson farm for a few months, scraped his hand, tearing his skin on the rusty wire.
“We’d better get you in to town for a tetanus shot,” Elaine said.
“Can I come?” Connor asked.
Mark needed four stitches.
“You should’ve heard what Mark said when the doctor stuck her needle in!” Connor told his father. “I got to watch!”
The second rainy day didn’t require a trip to the hospital, but it wasn’t ideal.
Dale came down with the stomach flu. “Must have been all that driving around,” he told his wife.
That left Jeff and the now one-handed Mark to wrestle the new concaves back into the combine and put things together again. Midway through the operation, Mark forgot about the bandage on his hand and let the concave clatter down to the shop floor.
“Well, it’s not dented too badly,” Jeff said, after they were over the shock and sure Connor hadn’t been too close to the commotion.
Midway through the third day, Mark and Jeff finally had the combine back together and Dale was feeling better.
“Now we’re ready to go and we can’t get to work,” Jeff said sadly, staring out the shop door at the drizzling rain.
“It’s not that bad,” Dale said. “It’s supposed to clear up tomorrow. The wheat will hold on until Wednesday. The canola’s swathed. And those soybeans aren’t ready to go yet anyway.”
Still, Jeff was irritable. He spent most of the day puttering around the shop. Picking things up and putting them back down. Taking things apart and putting them back together. Connor followed his dad around the shop, trying to find ways to help.
The Monday morning sun put Jeff in a better mood. “Connor’s gone for the day,” he said when Elaine and Jenny finished breakfast. “Why don’t we take the day off? How about going to Williston for lunch?”
They left Jenny with Jeff’s parents, stashed their passports in the glove box and made it to the border by 10 a.m. They’d just passed through U.S. Customs when Elaine’s cell phone rang.
“Make sure it’s someone worth paying roaming charges for,” Jeff joked.
Elaine checked her screen. “Uh oh.”
Two minutes later they were waving at the confused customs agent and crossing back into Canada. Once they cleared the border Jeff picked up speed.
In under an hour they screeched into the elementary school parking lot.
They found Connor in the school office, swinging his legs as he sat alone in a chair by the photocopier. The principal came out of her office, frowned at Jeff and Elaine, and beckoned them in to sit on hard plastic chairs.
“That was embarrassing,” Elaine said afterwards, on the way back to the car.
“I don’t understand why I can’t stay,” Connor said.
“I’ll explain when we get home, Connor,” Elaine said.
Connor first got Miss Holland’s attention at recess. It was too muddy in the playground for the kids to go out. Miss Brown thought Connor was playing in the corner with a couple of other boys when she heard a clatter. “You can twist these bolts right out,” he explained. Connor had taken an entire bookshelf apart and was now surrounded by shelves, picture books and impressed first graders. “I think we could put it together a better way,” he was saying.
After recess, in line at the water fountain, Nathan stepped on Connor’s foot. It was an accident, but it hurt. Connor let out a string of curse words exactly like the ones Mark had used in the doctor’s office. “That helps make it better,” Connor was telling the other boys when Miss Holland came running around the corner.
When it was time to try printing, Kyra got her long hair tangled in the class pencil sharpener. Connor was on the scene with his safety scissors before the teacher knew what was happening.
“I can fix this,” Connor said. “It’s going to be way easier to fix than that %*&$ barbed wire.” By the time Miss Holland got to the scene, Kyra was free. She looked admiringly at Connor, until she felt the bald patch on her head and saw her blond curls dangling from the sharpener. Then she let out a screech.
That was when the teacher led the confused boy out of the classroom and straight to the office.
“I didn’t realize he was paying that much attention,” Jeff said to Elaine in the car.
“He is,” Elaine said. “He wants to be just like you guys.”
“Yeah,” said Connor. “Can I help in the shop again when we get home?”
