The Last Favor

Melvin Crockett woke at four forty like he always did. Coffee on, boots on, out the door by five to check the sky. The routine had been running for fourteen years.

Except there was a truck in his yard.

Fifty feet of gravel between the porch and the corn, and Jace Baines's gray F-350 sat square in the middle of it, headlights off, engine ticking. Melvin stood on the top step with his mug and thought about going back inside. He didn't.

Jace was leaning against the tailgate, arms crossed, wearing a jacket that cost more than Melvin's combine payment. Fifty-five years old and built like the side of a grain elevator.

"You're late," Jace said.

"It's five in the morning."

"And you've been up since four forty, so what's your excuse?" Jace pushed off the tailgate and held out a clipboard. "Week starts now."

Melvin didn't take the clipboard. He drank his coffee instead.

"Jace, it's planting season. I don't got time for this."

"Exactly why we're doing it now." Jace shook the clipboard once, like a man offering a bone to a dog that won't fetch. "You signed the paper, Crockett. One week. I watch you run a crew, I sign the renewal on the mortgage, you keep your two hundred acres. You fail, we talk about other options."

"Other options meaning you buy me out cheap."

"Other options meaning we talk. Sit down like adults." Jace's voice went flat, the way it went flat back when Melvin was nineteen and had shown up to the recruitment office with a fake confident handshake. Some things didn't wear off a man. "Take the clipboard."

Melvin took the clipboard. There was one sheet on it. A list of jobs, half of them his own seasonal checklist copied out in somebody's neat handwriting, and a line at the bottom for signatures.

"I can run a crew," Melvin said. "I run it every year. Me, myself, and a couple of guys from the feed store when I can afford them."

"You run a farm. That ain't the same animal." Jace nodded at the truck. "You're about to learn the difference."

The passenger door opened.

***

She climbed down with a duffel bag over one shoulder and a thermos in her other hand. Mid thirties maybe, short hair, boots meant for walking and not for show. She set the duffel in the gravel and looked at the barn, the house, the half-dead windbreak, then at Melvin, like she was taking inventory and he came after the barn.

"This him?" she asked.

"This is Crockett," Jace said. "Melvin, Leanne Rasmussen. She's your second crew member for the week. Former Army medic, recently separated, needs work and a quiet place to sleep. She's got the cot in your bunkhouse, if your bunkhouse has a cot."

"It's got a cot," Melvin said. "It's got a cot and a mouse."

"I've had worse roommates," Leanne said.

Melvin looked at her. She looked back. She had a small scar through one eyebrow and the kind of patient face that made a man feel like he was being timed.

"You're the report-back part," Melvin said to Jace. "She's here to tell you if I'm slow."

"I'm here to spray your fields and not die of boredom," Leanne said. "If you're slow, that's your business."

"She'll report back regardless," Jace said. "That's the arrangement. You got a problem with the arrangement, you got my number."

Melvin had his number. Had it memorized from sixteen years of mortgage statements. He set the coffee mug down on the porch rail and read the clipboard properly. Spraying, fencing, the north pasture water line, the Barn, capital B, like it was a proper noun worth capitalizing.

"She's on the herbicide sprayer," Melvin said. "That's where I need hands. Fencing can wait, water line can't, and I'll do the water line myself while she sprays."

Jace raised an eyebrow. "You're negotiating already."

"I'm delegating. That's the word you wrote on the bottom of this thing. Underlined."

Leanne snorted into her thermos.

"What," Melvin said.

"Nothing. Delegating. Sure." She picked her duffel back up. "Which one's the sprayer?"

"The blue Kubota by the barn. Tank's clean, I flushed it Tuesday. Forty gallons of glyphosate mixed in the shop, labeled jug, don't smoke within ten feet of it."

"Done worse," she said. "Done it in worse places, too. Basra had wind like a hair dryer."

Melvin didn't know what to say to that, so he said nothing, which was his default. Jace watched the two of them stand there in the gray light and Melvin could feel him doing math, some test Jace had designed and Melvin hadn't studied for.

"Ground rules," Jace said. "I come back Thursday. I look at what got done. Leanne tells me how the week went, and Crockett, if she's got a black eye or a story about you yelling, that's a fail. Clear?"

"Crystal."

"Rasmussen."

"Clear," she said. "He yells, I'll tell you. He's polite, I'll tell you that too, and you'll be more surprised."

Jace almost smiled. Almost. He got in his truck, cranked it, and sat there a second with the window down.

"Hey, Melvin!"

Melvin leaned down to the window. "What."

"This is the last favor I'm doing you. After this week it's business, one way or the other." He pulled the door shut and the truck threw gravel all the way to the county road.

The yard got quiet. Just the windmill and the morning birds and a woman he'd known ninety seconds standing in his gravel with a duffel bag.

"He's a ray of sunshine," Leanne said.

"He's my landlord. Held my note since Dad left. Could've called it in three bad years ago and didn't." Melvin drained the last of the coffee, which had gone cold. "Now he's decided I can't run my own place unless some ex-drill sergeant watches me do it."

"And you agreed."

"The bank agrees with him. That's two votes."

She nodded like that made sense, and maybe it did. She followed him toward the barn, boots crunching, duffel over her shoulder, and stopped at the blue Kubota. Walked around it once. Checked the tank cap, squeezed the hose, looked at the nozzle tips.

"Who serviced this?"

"I did."

"Good job." She tossed the duffel into the cab and climbed up after it. "GPS on it or am I eyeballing rows?"

"Eyeball. My GPS is a pencil and a map on a clipboard."

"Christ." But she said it almost friendly. "Fine. Which fields, how much per acre, and where do you want the tank refills?"

Melvin told her. Forty acres of corn, twelve of beans, cut rate on the field nearest the creek because of the runoff, don't spray the strip by the fence line, there's a wildflower patch his mother planted in 1998 and he'd burn the field down himself before he'd spray over it.

Leanne listened to all of it without writing anything down.

"You'll remember that?"

"I was an army medic," she said. "I remembered drug doses and which soldier was allergic to what. Forty acres and a flower patch is easy." She started the Kubota, and the little diesel knocked and caught. She leaned out. "One thing."

"What."

"I'm not your employee. Jace is paying me, so I'm his. But while I'm on your land, you're the boss of the work. I'll do what you say about the spraying. That's the deal."

"That's the deal," Melvin said.

"Then we're straight." She put it in gear. "See you at lunch. I eat at noon, not whenever you feel like it."

"It'll be noon."

"Good man."

She rolled the sprayer down the track toward the south field, and Melvin stood in the yard with an empty mug and a clipboard and the feeling that the week had already gotten away from him. She was thirty-four, that woman, and widowed, according to Jace's one-paragraph background. Melvin didn't ask how Jace knew. Jace knew everything about everybody within twenty miles of Fort Alameda, it was his hobby.

Melvin went in, made eggs, packed a lunch for two because that seemed like the thing a crew boss did, and dug the old water line tools out of the shop. The morning went long. He dug up 200 feet of poly line that the gophers had chewed, replaced it, cussed a fair amount, and at noon exactly, right at noon, the sprayer came rumbling back up the track.

Leanne killed the engine and hopped down.

"South field's done. Started the beans. Where's lunch?"

"Kitchen. I ain't eating on a tailgate in this wind."

"Suit yourself, I was gonna eat on the tailgate." She grabbed her duffel anyway and followed him up to the porch. "Nice house."

"It's a house."

"You know, for a guy who's being tested on his people skills, you're really nailing it."

Melvin stopped with his hand on the screen door. "That's the test? People skills?"

"Everything's the test. That's how Jace works." She looked at him, and for the first time that morning she looked tired, in a way that had nothing to do with the hour. "I'd know. He tested me for six years."

"Then I guess we're both failing."

"Speak for yourself. I got forty acres sprayed and a lunch invite." She pushed the screen door open before he could. "Eggs?"

"Eggs," Melvin said, and followed her in.

They ate fast. Leanne put away three eggs and half a loaf of bread with casual ease, thanked him for it, and went back out before the plate was dry. Melvin washed up and followed, and the afternoon was the poly line and the beans and the sun climbing up over everything like it had a grudge.

By two the sweat had cut channels down his back and his shirt was stuck to him. Leanne worked the bean rows like she'd been doing it years, no wasted motion, and Melvin found himself watching her more than he should. Not because of how she looked, though that was part of it. Because she never stopped moving and never once looked bored.

At some point she stopped the sprayer and stood in the shade of the shop awning, drinking from a jug and wringing her hair out with one hand.

"Question," she said.

"Go ahead."

"Why don't you just take his buyout?"

Melvin set the wrench down slower than he needed to. "What buyout."

"Don't. I've seen the paperwork in the truck. Jace keeps files like other men keep photos. He's got a number for this place. Two million, maybe more with the water rights. You could take it and never smell diesel again."

"It's not for sale."

"He's your landlord, not your enemy. Man held your note through three bad years. That's not nothing."

Melvin felt it come up his neck before it got to his mouth. "You don't know a thing about it. My father broke that ground. My mother picked the wildflowers off the fence line the year I was born. If I sell it to a man who's been waiting on it since before I could drive, my father would roll over in his grave, and my mother would roll over next to him, and I'd deserve both."

The yard went quiet. Leanne looked at him, and her face didn't change, but she lowered the jug.

"You done?" she said.

He looked at his boots. "Yeah."

"Good. Because I was just asking a question, farmer. I didn't say take the money. I asked why you don't."

"I know."

"And you bit my head off."

"I know that too." He picked up the wrench, put it back down. It wasn't going anywhere. "I'm sorry. That was out of line. You've been here nine hours and it's not your fault the dirt's personal."

Leanne leaned against the Kubota and crossed her arms. "My husband was a mechanic. He'd snap like that over his tools. Somebody picked up a wrench wrong and he'd go off like a bottle rocket, then apologize like a dog." She shrugged. "I'm not mad. I'm just saying I recognize the shape of it."

"He was on base?" Melvin asked, though Jace's paragraph had covered it.

"Fort Hood. Training accident. A piece of lifting rig let go." She said it flat, the way you say something you've said a hundred times to people who didn't know what face to make. "He was twenty-eight. I was twenty-eight."

"I'm sorry."

"It was six years ago." She pushed off the truck. "So. Your father. He farmed this ground till when?"

"Till he didn't. Walked out when I was nineteen. My mother died two years after that, and I've been here alone ever since." Melvin wiped his hands on a rag that was blacker than his hands. "Jace took the note when Dad's credit dried up. Dad signed and left the same week."

"And you stayed."

"Somebody had to."

She looked out at the bean rows for a while. "Alright. I get it now. Let's get back to work before it gets hot."

"It's already hot."

"Then let's get back to work before it gets worse."

* * *

The F-350 came up the track at noon on Thursday without so much as a honk. Jace eased it in next to the shop like a man parking a tank and got out in a clean pearl-snap shirt, and Melvin thought, not for the first time, that the man must iron his clothes for the sheer pleasure of making everyone else feel like a slob.

They ate on the tailgate, because Leanne had won that argument the day before and Melvin had packed sandwiches accordingly. Jace stood at a polite distance, arms folded, watching them eat like it was a rifle inspection. Leanne ignored him completely, which took a certain kind of courage or a certain kind of history.

"Bread's dry," Jace said.

"Eat your own then," Leanne said.

"I brought my own."

"Then eat it and quit reviewing mine."

Jace almost smiled. Melvin saw it happen and un-happen in about a second. Then Jace tipped his head toward the shop. "Crockett. Walk with me."

They walked. Gravel, windmill, the usual.

"You got her spraying the creek field at cut rate and you redid two hundred feet of water line between breakfast and lunch," Jace said. "I like the initiative. Don't let it go to your head."

"Wasn't planning on it."

"Here's what's left." Jace stopped and turned, and up close his eyes were the flat gray of a sky about to do something. "You're working beside a