The Scale He Had to Pull Onto

I am forty-eight years old. I sat at that steel desk and counted twenty-six of them with my finger.

I did not cry. I thought about it and decided against it. I put the statement back and turned out the light.

In the morning, after Larry and Jeff had gone to work on the feeder house, I drove to the co-op.

Wes has managed the elevator for fifteen years. He is a big, tired, fair man who is always chewing a toothpick and has never been seen to hurry. He had asked me three falls running to come work his scale house for harvest. I had the head for it, he said, and nobody could read my sevens for ones. Three falls running I had laughed and said I had a crew to feed.

He was in the office with his feet on a pallet of seed catalogs.

“Wes,” I said. “Is that scale job still open?”

He took the toothpick out.

“For you it is,” he said. “Seven to seven through harvest, six days, Sundays if the weather’s chasing us. Eighteen an hour. You’d start the week after Labor Day so I can train you before it gets wild.” He looked at me a moment. “Everything all right at home?”

“Everything’s fine at home,” I said. “I’d just like to be on somebody’s books.”

He thought that over. He is a married man.

“I’ll get you the paperwork,” he said.

I told Larry at supper. I had made pork chops, because I was not angry at him and I did not want it to look like I was.

“I took a job,” I said. “At the elevator. I’m running the scale for Wes through harvest.”

He set his fork down.

“You don’t need to do that,” he said. “We’re not hurting. Are we hurting?”

“We’re not hurting. I’d know.”

“Then why?”

I had practiced this in the car, and I said it as level as I could.

“Because there’s a line on Mr. Hodge’s form,” I said. “And I’d like to have something true to put on it.”

He sat very still. I could see him go back over the afternoon before and find it.

“Deb,” he said. “That was for the form. That’s just what you put.”

“I know what it was for. I want you to know what it cost, and then I won’t bring it up again.” I kept my hands flat on the table. “You told that man twenty-six years of my work was nothing. You said it with my folder open on his desk. And then I had to pick up his pen and sign my name under it. I have never in my life felt so small, Larry, and it was you that did it.”

He looked at his plate.

“I didn’t mean anything by it.”

“I know that too,” I said. “I think that’s what bothers me.”

He did not have an answer for that. I had not expected one.

“The books are on the desk,” I said. “I’m not walking away from anything. Everything that comes due before Thanksgiving is in the red folder, in order, with the dates on the front. Jeff’s check is the first and the fifteenth. The fuel bill is net thirty. The insurance agent’s number is on the inside cover, and there’s a note about the north eighty that you need to read.”

“Who’s going to feed the crew?”

It was an honest question. He was not being smart. He truly had not thought of it until that second, and I watched it land on him.