Harvest Workers

It is how farmers’ wives spend summer nights. Delivering food to fields, cups of dark coffee to urge wearying bodies to push on.

I am late, and men must be hungry, and I wait at wheat’s fringe till combine growls near, eating up kernels for the making of bread, and then I’ll hand up nourishment for men running machines.

They don’t come.

Dots of light sit motionless in the distance. Waiting for what? I can’t tell. I pass moments praying, grab Bible from passenger seat.

And then illuminated pinpoints blink, blink, blink. A soundless night plea: Come, Come, Come.

Wheat stubble irritates underbelly of vehicle, prickling and scratching, and I cringe and hope nothing is itched raw. Light seeping ahead into black coaches me on. I idle close to the shadows, step out into the close warm of a late July night.

Two brothers, broad shoulders and grease-smeared jeans, are leaning up under a combine, its one monstrous side peeled open. Brother-in-law John has pliers in hand, surgical equipment considering emergency operation.

Farmer Husband turns, finds my face in the black. “Ann.” He sounds surprised. “Thought it was Bert sitting on the headlands waiting.”

Bert, their older brother and, like John, a licensed mechanic.

“Sorry.” I smile weakly. I am no mechanic, me still in apron. “Bert’s up at the bin with the auger, unloading the wagons. He’s taken over for your Dad.”

I had given them both something to eat, and then Dad, limping with sore hip, back, knee, had pulled up into his pick up, turned headlights around, and headed home to his lightless house. I wished someone was there to draw him a hot bath, throw his dirty clothes in the wash. Turn back the sheets for those weary bones.

Tentative, I step through the sheared wheat stalks, a bag of food in each hand.

“Not going well?”

Farmer husband’s pulling out belts of rubber, the combine’s black intestines.

“Chopper belt broke, got caught in the drive pulley, whipped around and knocked off the beater belt and somehow tangled around the wiring harness, pulling it into the straw walker belt and slashed the whole thing up. Cut the combine down dead.”

I squint up through a labyrinth of gears and mechanisms. And there it is, shocking and ugly. A bundle of wires, thick as my arm, dangles like shredded tendons, sinews sliced.

He tosses lengths of the belt onto the chopper deck and they coil like a dead snake.


“Checked the main fuse panel first since the whole thing just went black. Couldn’t figure why all a half dozen fuses were blown. Had to be wiring somewhere and we opened her up and found this mess.”

A wire crackles, a spray of sizzling sparks, and we jolt. “Maybe we should disconnect the battery?” Farmer husband offers. John nods, but says nothing.

There is nothing to say, really. This combine is not moving out of the field tonight, maybe not for days. The Tollenaar boys tore out the wiring harness of a tractor last year and a replacement ran them over ten thousand.

No, there is nothing to say, really. We’ll have to tarp the combine’s grain bin, covering up exposed kernels from clouds slinking in. We’ll have to make some calls in the morning, better assess the damage and the depths of our pockets to cover the costs to get power surging through this machine again.

John climbs up the back ladder to the battery and Farmer Husband’s looking into the dark of the field for snippets of wire sheared off. “And John had just taken home the old combine to the shop because the drive bar to the knives snapped.” He spots another glimmer of wire.

“He hadn’t even made one round and then this happens. It’s all just running too heavy. Now we’re down both combines.”

The crop is heavy, stalks thick, heads swelling, and the mechanical beasts have been working hard and long to bring it in. Hard enough to break steel header bars, hard enough to burn through thick belts.

Rain’s in the forecast; I saw the hot spots of red edging across the radar. And there’s 120 acres of heads of wheat hanging low, past ready. Sky water could sprout those kernels left to the elements. Yet we are utterly powerless to bring in that harvest just waiting.

“Want anything to eat?” I hold out the bag. It’s small solace but it’s all I have.

“No.” He shakes his head, pulls at the peak of his cap. “I feel sick to my stomach.”

My brother pulls up in a pick-up, flicks off glaring shafts, and floating dust particles vanish. Bert and him step out. The three Voskamp brothers congregate, heads close in field deliberations, and my brother spots me, offers his hand, a nod.

“Looks like harvest is going to have to wait now, eh?”

There’s nothing to say, really. Harvest waiting and no geared workers.

Tractor beams spotlight an orb of wheat and I feel heavy about a dark world tonight white with harvest and no workers for the fields.

Does the angst of it make me lose my appetite?

I turn towards the knot of men and brother-in-law John standing there, and he says the first words I have heard him say all night and it’s not about his gutted combine. He’s look up at those heavens laying close.

“There are stars up there.”

I look up too at that velvet blanket quilted with silver and whisper, “Yes, there are stars up there.”

Night diamonds blink, blink, blink, and I hear His plea to a kingdom of light to go out into the night and its ready harvest: Come, Come, Come.

At the very least, I can bring food to weary workers.


Lord, how can I help bring in the harvest today? Or help sustain the workers?


“The harvest is plentiful but the workers are few. Ask the Lord of harvest, therefore, to send our workers into his harvest field.” ~Mt. 9:37-38