Back in the car she said, “I think I die this year, maybe this month.”
“I die first,” Jiichan replied. “Japanese women live to nineties.”
“I die first! You eat many mandarin orange as child. They make you live longer. Vitamin C.”
“You drink more green tea. You live longer.”
They continued like this for several minutes, at the end of which I wasn’t sure who the matter was settled in favor of. Personally, I planned to live until I was 103, like my great-grandmother on my father’s side had. All she did toward the end was watch TV, like it was more important than the real people around her. But there was a lot of good stuff on TV, so it wasn’t such a terrible last few years.
We drove quietly, except for Jaz, who popped his perfect bubbles over and over. For some reason, that started to make me crazy. “Can you stop popping your gum so much, please?” I asked him politely.
“Make me.”
“You are so immature!”
He gave me a hard, angry look, and then I was already unbuckling my seat belt as he started pounding the side of his head on his window, his LEGO building tottering on his lap. I wrapped my arms around him and squeezed, so he wouldn’t hurt himself. I had learned that when you’re trying to hold someone still, you had to concentrate on squeezing, just as you had to concentrate when you did math or English. If you tried to do it with just your strength and not your mind, you would fail. In fact, Jiichan taught me to meditate partly because he thought that would help my concentration whenever I had to hold Jaz back.
After a couple of minutes he calmed down. Jiichan had pulled over, and he and Obaachan were watching. Jiichan said sadly, “You lucky to have each other. Why fight?”
“All I did was say he was immature,” I said. “Alyssa says that all the time to
“You’re not even human!” Jaz cried out. “You’re nothing but a smelly DEET bomb! Smellface!”
I set him loose and moved back to look out my window. I wasn’t going to talk to him for the rest of the ride. Let’s see
“You grounded, Summer,” Obaachan said. I didn’t answer, but she continued. “You start fight.”
I took a big breath. I supposed she was right, but nobody ever thought about how hard it was for me to have Jaz for a brother.
At last we reached the Parkers’ house. Jiichan opened the car door, said, “I die first” to Obaachan, and got out, slamming the door.
The sun hung above the horizon, a red ball like on the Japanese flag. That’s what the sunrise always made me think of. Uh-oh! The sunrise today was after six! We were late. I hoped we weren’t in trouble already.
The Parkers owned a good chunk of land. A whole acre was devoted just to their machines. I saw four combines that I knew they rented; four big rigs (semis) they owned; two camper trailers, one much bigger than the other; a tractor and grain cart; four grain trailers; four pickups; and a variety of trailers to load some of the equipment on. I knew a lot about those machines. The combines were hulking, bright green John Deeres; that’s what most harvesters used. The cabs had two seats, and the windows stretched from floor to roof. You drove on the right side instead of the left for some reason.
Combine harvesters are kind of magical machines. This is what happens during harvest: When the wheat is ripe and ready to cut, the combines drive in an orderly fashion, up and down through the wheat fields. In the front of the combine is a detachable apparatus called a header. The header cuts the crop as the combine moves forward. Then the insides of the combine separate the edible wheat from the inedible chaff and then send the wheat into a bin on the back of the combine. The chaff drops to the ground, where it stays to help fertilize the soil for next year.
I don’t know. I mean, maybe computers and cell phones and rocket ships are more magical, but to me, nothing beats the combine. That’s just the way I see things. In a short time, the combine takes something humans can’t use and then turns it into something that can feed us.
So. The bins hold about 275 bushels of wheat. At the usual speed of five miles per hour, a combine can cut six hundred or so bushels of wheat in an hour. There are a
To get the wheat grains out of the bin, the combine has an auger, which is a long, hollow, pipelike contraption that pushes the wheat from one end of the auger to the other. The auger moves the wheat from the bin to a grain cart.
A grain cart is attached to a tractor that pulls it up and down the fields. Neither the tractor nor the combine stops moving as the combine driver dumps wheat from the bin to the cart. Not stopping saves time, which is so, so important to harvesting—the grain has to be cut when it’s just right.
Stick with me; I’m almost done explaining what happens in the field! The grain cart holds a thousand bushels. When it gets full, the tractor is driven to one of the grain trailers attached to the waiting big rigs, and its auger is used to dump the wheat from the cart into the trailer. When the trailer is full, the big rig takes the wheat to an elevator, where the grain is stored until the farmer sells it.
I learned all this when I was seven and went on my first harvest. You know how there are some people who just love little kids and will take the time to explain anything to them? And then of course there are people who love
Wait, where was I? Oh yeah. So, the grain elevators use systems of augers to move the wheat into the silos. If rain was coming, the process would continue until the early hours of the morning, so that all the farmers could get their wheat in before the rain. Some elevators were even open 24/7.
That’s one job I would never want: operating an elevator. Sometimes employees would slip from ladders or walkways and end up suffocating beneath tons of grain. Also, the grain dust in the air could ignite easily. Before I was born, an elevator in Kansas exploded and killed seven people. Another time, six more people died in an elevator explosion. Scary!
Jiichan told me that Mr. and Mrs. Parker had started out as combine drivers, then saved enough to qualify for a loan to buy their first big rig. Now they could afford to hire people like my family to drive the combines and trucks. If you were a custom harvester, you were the boss; but if you were a combine driver, you only worked for a custom harvester and didn’t get paid much. My parents hoped to become custom harvesters one day too. They would start out with one semi, or two if the bank would give them a big enough loan.
Like us, the Parkers lived in farm country in a white A-frame house. But their house was a lot bigger.
The front door of the main house was wide open. Thunder sniffed at the doorway. Jiichan tried knocking, but no one answered, so he knocked harder. Obaachan said, “Summer, you call hello. You talk best.”
She always said that.
“Hello?” I called out. “Hellloo!” Nobody answered, but we could hear voices from inside. “Let’s just go in,” I told my grandparents.
“Oh, no,” Jiichan said. “Not polite.”
“Never go inside if nobody let you in,” Obaachan agreed.
“Then we’re just going to have to wait here,” I said. “But the door’s open. That means we can go inside. I’m sure it’s okay.”
“No, not okay,” Jiichan said, shaking his head.
“Helloooooo!” Jaz suddenly shrieked.
There was an abrupt silence from inside, and then Mr. and Mrs. Parker came to the door. “Toshiro, Yukiko, come in. You don’t have to knock!” Mrs. Parker said.
So we took off our shoes and entered. We were wearing running shoes that were identical except for being different sizes. The Parkers’ house was pretty inside. A wedding-ring quilt, all in shades of pale blues and yellows and pinks, hung on the wall facing the front door. A quilt was one of two things I had always wanted. The other thing was a wicker chair for the front porch. “What kind of girl wants a wicker chair?” my mother had asked when
