He got my mother.
It took the fire department fifty-one minutes to find him, because Walt couldn’t tell them which field he was in. He was pinned in the dark with no landmarks and a tractor on his legs, and every field on that farm looked the same at night.
She found him anyway.
She asked him if he could see the light on top of the grain elevator. She asked him if it was on his left or on his right. Then she asked him about the church steeple. Could he see it? Which side? She drew a line across the county with a pencil from a chair in a basement, and she sent the trucks right down it.
And for fifty-one minutes, every time Walt started to drift off, every time his voice went soft and far away, she asked him about his boy.
I didn’t know any of that standing on the shoulder. Walt told me himself about twenty minutes later, with his hand resting on the roof of my mother’s car.
