At midnight, Hollis made a pot of coffee in the farmhouse and carried it to the barn in insulated containers. She found Ellis hunched beside the old picker, using a work light to inspect a drive component. The two former students had replaced a damaged tire and were examining the guards. They had already agreed to leave the picker unpowered until every exposed moving part had been secured. Hollis asked whether they could be ready by dawn. Ellis considered the question longer than she liked.
"We might test it in the morning," he said. "Ready to run an entire field is a different question."
"I don't need an entire field."
"You need a machine that doesn't injure somebody."
"I know." Hollis set coffee beside the workbench. "I'm just watching the sky."
Ellis wiped his hands. "So am I. But your father knew what a shortcut could cost. He wouldn't want you trading a finger for a few rows of corn."
Hollis glanced toward the binder, now covered with grease marks and pencil additions. It was becoming their common language. People who had never worked together before were using Roland's diagrams to divide tasks. The old man, she thought, had managed one last harvest crew from the far side of his own death.
By one in the morning, another combine had arrived. Its operator was a woman named Ruth Keegan, who ran a farm thirty miles north with her brother. She pulled alongside Wes's machine, waited while he signaled an appropriate separation, and began a second set of passes. The sight of two moving headlights sent Hollis running to the field edge with her phone. She filmed ten seconds to send to her motherly aunt in Des Moines, the closest family she had left. Then she stopped recording and returned to work, embarrassed by the urge to prove to somebody that the farm was still fighting.
Ruth came in at two thirty for fuel and a cup of coffee. She was in her fifties, her hair silver at the temples, her boots stained with mud, and her voice matter-of-fact. She asked Hollis to show her the field map and the moisture readings. Then she pointed toward a strip along the drainage ditch. "If that ground gets saturated, it will trap a combine. We should finish it while we can, assuming conditions stay safe. Keep the trucks on the ridge."
"I marked it yellow," Hollis said.