"It wasn’t anything," Judy blushed. "I mean, I drive that tractor all the time. I just had to think of using it."

"They sure made a big issue out of you being paralyzed," Sylvia said.

"Too big of an issue," Judy agreed. "I came out of the delivery room with Lori and Amanda, and there was a guy standing there with a video camera. I mean, I wanted to be nice, so I talked with him for a minute before Lydia and I drove the tractor back home. When I saw the news the next evening, I almost fell out of my chair."

Sylvia blinked away a tear. "Maybe you did some good," she said. "Ever since I came down with this thing, I’ve tried to tell people that just because you’re handicapped doesn’t mean you’re some kind of freak. You listened. Maybe someone else did, too."

They sat and talked with Sylvia for more than an hour before they left. On the way to Sylvia’s house to pick up the corn head, Judy commented, "I’m afraid we’re going to have to go to another funeral pretty soon."

"Yeah," Ken replied quietly. "I’m going to miss her. We’ve been so busy the last year, we’ve gotten out of touch, and we shouldn’t have."

"I’ll miss her, too," Judy said. "She’s right, you know. When we started going together, I guess I did think of myself as some kind of freak. I used to wonder all the time what it would be like to be normal. You never treated me like I was anything but normal, and I’ve come to believe I really am."

"You’re not just normal," Ken said as he backed the pickup up to the snowed-in wagon. "You’re very special to me."

Ken reached for the hitch pin he’d laid on the seat, but found himself holding his wife, instead.

As they pulled the corn head through Willow Lake, Judy spoke up. "Lori and Amanda are coming home today, and if Bob is the same kind of housekeeper you are, I’d bet she’d like to see the dishes washed when she gets home. She gave me a key, so why don’t you drop me off at her house, and pick me up later?"

"All right with me," Ken said. "I wanted to go over to the feed mill and talk fertilizer today, anyway. After I get done there, I’ll come by and help out."

There was a dart board on the wall of Herb Anderson’s office. Herb, Bob Watson’s boss, ran the fertilizer part of the Willow Lake Farm Center operation, and he was even bored with tossing darts.

A little fertilizer had been moving all winter, and Herb had been out contracting what he could, but everything had come to a halt with all the snow on the ground. He thought about going out to the shop, where Bob had been repainting an anhydrous ammonia tank, but with Bob gone to pick up his new child, even that seemed a little boring. He was a little surprised to see Ken Sorensen walk into his office and sit down. He didn’t know the Sorensen kid well, since he’d always dealt with his father or brother. But, he had heard stories from Bob about the old Oliver 70 and the combine he was rebuilding. He also knew who had driven Bob’s wife to the hospital. "How’s that combine of yours coming?" he asked.

"Better than I hoped," Ken said, and got down to business. "Bob says you cut fertilizer prices in the winter, to keep some activity going."

"Yeah," Anderson nodded. "In another month, prices will go up ten to fifteen percent."

"All right," Ken smiled. "Can I get an empty cart from you this spring for a week or so?"

"Shouldn’t be any problem."

Ken pulled a computer printout from his shirt pocket. "Well, let’s order some fertilizer, then," he said. "You still have a cash discount?"

"Eight percent."

"Well, that’s not what I’m paying in interest, but the early order will more than make up the difference. You don’t have to be in any rush to deliver this stuff. Any time in the next month or so will be fine."

"Where are you going to put all that stuff?"

"Have Bob bring the auger truck," Ken said. "I’ve got some small grain bins we’ll dump it in till we need it." He proceeded to read off a list of the fertilizer he needed.

Halfway through the list, Anderson stopped him. "6-20-22 is kind of an oddball blend," he said. "I’ll have to charge you extra for it. I can let you have 6-24-24 for about nine dollars a ton less."

"Fine," Ken said. "I need that in bags for the corn planter."

"You sure you need it in bags?" the dealer asked. "That’s an extra seven bucks a ton. If you’ve got some empty gravity boxes, we can put it in those. Lay a tarp on the ground under the spout, and scoop it into the planter."

It was almost a hundred dollar savings, Ken knew, at the expense of not much more work. "Good idea," he said. "I can park the gravity boxes inside until I need them, and run them down here and save the delivery costs."

"Don’t bother," Anderson told him. "Free delivery within fifteen miles this month."

"Hey, great," Ken said, and began to run down through the rest of the list.

Anderson consulted a price book, and then started running the adding machine. The machine whirred a few times, and the total made the dealer frown. "Is this just to get you started?" he asked.

"Well, I’ll need a little anhydrous after the corn gets up," Ken said, "But no point in getting that now."

Herb shook his head. "This isn’t a third of what your dad ordered last year."

Ken smiled. "I went through a heavy soil testing program a couple months ago," he said.

"Not our lab," Anderson frowned again.

Ken grinned. Back when he was taking soil chemistry, his professor had warned him that commercial labs, under contract to fertilizer dealers, had a tendency to be more than a bit liberal with the amount of fertilizer a sample required. "I got my soil chemistry professor up at Western to run it through their lab," Ken explained. "I will be needing more next year, though, if we don’t lease the place out."

"Oh, I get it," the dealer said. "If you lease it out, then the lessee has to pay the extra expense. Smart move. Got your checkbook?"

"Sure do," Ken smiled. The total came to even less than he’d hoped. More savings! If they did have to farm another year, he wasn’t about to tell Anderson yet about how little more he intended to order. He’d developed another idea.

Hey, Hick!" Judy called from the shop door. "You need anything from town?"

Ken put down the wrench. He almost had the combine ready to work, which was good, since the ground was starting to thaw, and other work was calling. "Yeah," he replied. "I need six, three-quarter by two-and-a-half-inch hex-head bolts, common thread, and a spool of barbed wire."

"I’ll get it," Judy called back. "Your mother and I are taking the pickup."

Ken picked the wrench up again and slid back under the machine. It was too bad he wouldn’t be able to finish up with the painting, but that could wait for another winter. He’d managed to find some alfalfa where the 4630 didn’t sink in too bad.

A moment later, he heard the roaring of a heavy truck motor outside, followed by the blat of an air horn. Once again, he slid out from under the combine, to see Bob walking in the door. "Th-thought I’d f-f-find you h-here," Bob said. "Got your c-corn s-s-starter."

"That’s about it, isn’t it?" Ken asked.

Bob told Ken that there was one more small load to come; he’d been coming out to the farm with fertilizer at one time or another for a month. "I’ll get the H and roll a gravity box out," Ken told his friend as he reached for his coat; it was still chilly outside. Starting the Farmall was no easy task on a cold day, but once it was running, Ken rolled an orange gravity box out into the sunlight and under the delivery boom of the auger truck. Bob set the fertilizer moving, and the two got up into the truck cab to get out of the wind.

"How’s Amanda doing?" Ken asked, warming to the heat from the truck’s heater.

"Just fine," Bob smiled, and mentioned the combine. "S-sure looks f-funny. Is it an Ol-Oliver or a M-M-Moline?"

Ken smiled. "I keep thinking I need to call it a Moliver. A 2420."

"Wh-where d-d-did you c-come up w-w-with t-t-that m-model n-number?"

"I worked it out," Ken said. "It’s the average of 544 and 4296," Ken told him. "That machine sure is."

The women returned with the pickup truck full of crates. "What are you going to do with all those chickens?" Ken asked.

"While you’ve been working on the combine, Judy and I cleaned out the hen house," Lydia said. "We still have everything we need for them, but we’re going to have to haul water."

Ken looked at the crates filled with full-grown white chickens. He soon learned that Lydia had found a chicken farmer who was willing to part with a small part of his flock that was getting past their prime laying age. "We’re still going to have a couple dozen eggs a day," Ken said. "We can’t eat that many."

"We’ll spread them around for a while, but we’re going to eat some of these birds, too," Judy said. "They’re not really what you’d call fryers, but the price is right."

Judy knew the right approach to calm Ken down; visions of fried chicken danced in his head. "Have you figured out the mix we’ll have to grind for chicken feed?" he asked.

"I mixed some this morning," Judy said. "Without that feed grinder, this wouldn’t work out nearly as well."

Ken shook his head. "I had to open my mouth. Did you get my bolts and my wire?"

"We did," Judy said. "We stopped off at Mr. Needham’s office, too."

"Any progress on the will?"

"No," Lydia shook her head. "In fact, it’s worse. Carolyn filed for a continuance."

"She must have figured that she needed a better case," Ken said.

"I guess," Lydia agreed. "She also asked the judge for a trustee to manage the farm. She claims you aren’t competent to do it."

"So, am I farming, or not?" Ken asked angrily.

"The judge threw it out, and wouldn’t even set a date to hear it," Lydia told him. "He said if Henry Daly thought you could handle it, he was willing to go along."

The field was still muddy, almost too muddy for the Ford loader, but the fence had to be put in. The contract beef calves were due in any day, and when they came, the cattle they’d been keeping would have to be turned out to pasture.

Much fencing had been ripped out around the farm over the years, but still there were plenty of fence posts to be found, and Ken had managed to come up with enough used barbed wire that only a little new wire was needed. The problem was that around a hundred fence posts needed to be driven, and Ken knew that his arms would ache by the time he finished.

Fortunately, the ground was soft, and it didn’t take many blows with a post pounder to get a post in the ground. Judy followed along, driving the loader, its bucket full of posts. After a few posts, Ken took a breather. "This is going to take a while," he said.

"I’ve been sitting here watching you," Judy said. "I keep thinking, what would happen if you set a post upright, and I pushed it in with the loader bucket?"

Ken thought about it. "Might work," he agreed.

If the ground had been much harder, it probably wouldn’t have worked. As it was, after just a few posts, they had it down to a science. Ken would pace off the distance to the next post, while Judy followed with the loader. He would take a post from the loader and stand it upright while Judy raised the bucket; one good push, and it was in the ground. Sometimes, where the soil was firmer, Judy would have to whack the post with the raised bucket once or twice to get it in deep enough. By then, Ken would be pacing off the distance to the next post.

Ken remembered the agony and trouble of stretching barbed wire by hand, but after the new approach of driving the fence posts, it was easy to come up with an alternative method. They went back to the house for lunch with all the posts driven. Ken rigged up an apparatus that would unroll three strands of wire at a time from the back of the loader, and an arrangement that involved 2x4s to stretch it with the tractor. They were done by supper, at least a day sooner than he had expected. "Well, Candybar will have a nice big pasture to run in with the steers," he said. "We’re going to be cutting it a bit tight on pasturage until the new alfalfa comes in, though."

"Wish you hadn’t plowed that up last fall," Judy commented.

"Well, it was getting to where it needed it," Ken told her. "And, we didn’t have any idea we were going to be doing more beef rather than rotate to a different crop. As it is, this pasture will be a little thin this summer. It gets to be July and August, we’re going to have to feed some first-cutting hay, but we’ll make it up on the second and third cuttings. And, we can feed some of last year’s ear corn we still have left. With prices what they are now, I don’t want to sell it if I don’t have to."

Spring came with a rush. Judy’s morning chores became more complicated. First, there were more than twice as many steers to be fed than she had done in the past, and they had to be more careful with the feeding.

The custom steers were owned by a man in town who didn’t have a farm, but liked to dabble in farming. His habit was to shop calf auctions, looking for a bargain, and then hire someone to get the calves ready for slaughter. Ken had figured his costs closely. He had only a limited time to finish the steers, and a limited budget if he wanted to make a profit. He’d worked with the extension agent to come up with the best ration he could, but it became Judy’s job to do the actual feeding, using the loader and the rattletrap old feed grinder that Chet and Tom had cobbled up years before. All the extra cattle meant extra manure, and that meant more trips to the fields with the spreader, too.

The chickens took a much different mix of feed, but Judy only had to mix that every few weeks, as the handful of chickens took a long time to eat their way through a loader bucket full. But, every morning and every night, she had to gather eggs and feed and water the chickens; it was difficult until she found Tom and Ken’s old "Radio Flyer" toy wagon sitting unused in a storeroom, and that made the job easy.

The chicken manure went to the garden. Ken had been prevailed upon to disc the garden, and although it was too early to plant much there, Judy and Lydia had some ambitious plans. "We can’t eat that much sweet corn," Ken commented on seeing the plans for the first time.

"We can sell some at the farmer’s market in Geneva," Judy said. "And, maybe in Camden, too."

"I suppose you’ll want me to lay that in there with the corn planter."

"Would you?" Judy asked. "That’s a great idea! I mean, I don’t think we want eight rows of it, but you can run only four rows, can’t you?"

Spring was well advanced when Ken and Judy took off a little early one beautiful, warm, blue-sky afternoon, and drove into Geneva for a workout. The workouts had become even less frequent than before, but they somehow didn’t seem to matter as much as they once had. They went out of their way to go into Willow Lake to pick up some ice cream when they saw a sight that took them back a long way: on a lawn in front of a house in town, a boy and a girl dressed for the prom stood, the girl’s proud father snapping photos of the pair.

"Hick, that was only three years ago," Judy said, wonderingly. "It doesn’t seem possible."

Ken nodded. "We’ve come a long way in three years, Crip," he agreed. "I don’t think either of us ever imagined in our wildest dreams what would come out of that date though. Have you ever been sorry you agreed to go to the prom with me?"

"No," Judy said, thinking about how much had happened to her. "Never."

Back home they ate their ice cream. Ken picked up a farm magazine, while Judy went into the bedroom. She came out a few minutes later, wearing her old prom dress. "It still fits," she exclaimed.

Ken looked at her. The woman wearing that dress was hardly the shy, sheltered, rather pathetic girl that had worn it three years before. "You look wonderful," he said. "Even better than you did then. What an evening that was!"

"It changed my life," Judy agreed. "It changed it for the better in so many ways, I can’t count them. I still don’t know what you saw in me, back then, but whatever it was, I’m glad it what there and you realized it."

Ken flipped on the radio to find some nice, quiet music. He got up, took her in his arms, and they discovered they hadn’t completely forgotten what Beth had taught them about dancing. Finally, as the song ended, they shared a kiss neither of them would have dreamed of on that evening three years before. They kissed for a long time, before Judy whispered in her husband’s ear, "There’s something else we’ve learned how to do, too."

As the spring brightened, field work called. Ken spent long hours in the seat of the 4630, even though there wasn’t as much work to be done this year. They were running a lot less corn, and more beans and oats, but the land committed to pasture brought the total down. To Ken’s mind, the best part about the whole thing was that it spread the work out more; it wasn’t as if five hundred acres of corn had to be planted all at once as it couldn’t be harvested all at once, anyway.

Occasionally, there was even time to take a break. While loading manure one day, Judy watched from the seat of the loader as Ken opened the shop door and backed the combine out into the sun for the first time in months. It was so gaudy it almost hurt her eyes. Here and there, it still sported Minneapolis-Moline yellow and brown, but there were large patches of Oliver green and white, as well as other parts with orange, light green, and maroon primer. Judy wondered what her husband was up to as he ran the machine over to the machinery shed.

With the manure loaded in the spreader, Judy drove the loader over to see what Ken was doing. She found the combine of many colors nosed up to the new corn head. "I thought we were going to have wheat long before we had corn," she said.

"Well, yeah," Ken said. "But I found a little strip, maybe a hundred yards long and two rows wide, that somebody missed on that last day last fall."

"If you wanted to pick it, wouldn’t it just be easier to take the Oliver out there?"

Ken smiled. "I suppose it would, but I want to see if this thing really works."

"I’m coming, too," Judy said.

"Well, go spread that manure first," Ken told her. "This is going to take a while."

The sun was sinking low in the west before Ken had the corn head on the machine. Judy clambered up into the cab and found a place on the cab floor to sit next to her husband as the ungainly machine waddled down the Sorensen driveway and east down the road to the Johnson place.

Judy could see where Ken had disked right up close to the two remaining corn rows; this field was going to be drilled with beans. Ken lined the machine up along the center of the two rows, kicked the drive into gear, and began to ease forward. The racket was enormous, and there were strange clunking sounds she couldn’t recognize, but Ken had a big smile on his face. After twenty yards or so, Ken stopped, looked into the grain bin, then climbed down and looked here and there in the machine. "Needs a little adjustment," he said as he climbed back into the cab. "But, you know what, Crip?"

"What?"

Ken let out a big scream of delight. "This thing works!"

In the remaining corn, Ken tested the rest of the head, then just let it roar down the last few yards. At the end of the row, it was so narrow that Ken had to back up to turn around. Back on the road, they caught a strange look from a passing driver or two. Ken wasn’t sure whether it was because of what the machine looked like, or the sight of a corn head picker in use on the road in the spring. "When we get back up to the house," he said, "put the grain bucket on the loader, and we’ll run out of the bin right into the bucket. We can dump it in the corn hopper."

"I’m relieved," Judy told her husband. "I was beginning to wonder if all the time and money was going to be wasted."

Ken shook his head. "No," he said. "All the time and money just got us back to where we were before Tom decided he had to have the biggest combine in Dohrman County."