Forbes retreated into the deep hatred of his dream: the field stretching over the hills
with soil so rich you could brew it for a dollar. “I don’t know how to let him go. He’s the only
thing I have le ft.”
A score of birds scattered for the horizon toward a faint line of clouds, or away from
them. He could not forget that morning thirty years ago. Something was stirring. Something
deep. Torrential. An atonement….
The sky a slaughter. The morning birds in riot. Forbes and his son Dylan, fresh from a night of
stargazing, awake in Dylan’s birthday present— a green A-frame tent given to him because he
loves to camp. They had set it up in the front yard and left the rain fly off all night and listened
to the wind swaying through the cottonwoods while they studied the stars.
Forbes steps outside into the cool morning. He thinks of an adage he had read in sailing
stories as a child, and then dismisses it: Red sky at night, sailor’s delight. Red sky at morning,
sailor take warning .
The summer rains had come hard, and in this relatively dry window, they had to get as
much corn harvested as they could before another storm came. If everything went right, they’d
have more corn than they’d ever dreamed.
There is so much corn, in fact, that he’d never harvest it all with his own faulty
combine. McCole had promised to help in his own state-of-the-art machine, but days before, he
had suffered a mild heart attack and was too sick to drive. So Forbes employs Dylan. His plan
is to drive McCole’s while Dylan drives theirs, which the boy had driven before.
As they walk into the field together, smelling the cool earth and eying those black-
bellied thunderheads forming in the distance, he imagines driving through the middle of the
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