Elijah “Big Eli” Washington stared at his large, dark
hands under the harsh yellow light of the barn.
Blackened knuckles, a jagged, poorly healed scar cutting
across the back of his left thumb. He smelled burnt wiring
and ancient diesel, the distinct metallic stench of a
combine harvester giving up the ghost. The heat of the July
evening pressed down on his broad, powerful shoulders
like a physical weight.
Out in the fields, the cicadas screamed in a steady,
deafening drone. Big Eli dragged a rag over his hands,
doing nothing but moving the grease around. The
alternator was shot, sizzled into a useless lump of copper
and iron. A replacement was $500.
He had $83 in his checking account, a mortgage payment
due on the first, and thirty acres of winter wheat that
wouldn't harvest itself. At sixty-four years old, he didn't
want to go to town. He wanted to sit on his porch, drink a
cheap domestic beer, and let the quiet ringing in his ears—
a parting gift from a mortar shell in Vietnam more than
forty years ago—lull him to sleep. But the wheat didn't care
about his fatigue, and neither did his young grandson who