The Scale He Had to Pull Onto

I did not think a thing of it. I cannot see one acre of our ground from that scale house, and I had forty trucks on my mind.

At half past ten the phone on my counter rang. It was Wes, up in the office.

“Deb, I’ve got Kim from the insurance agency on the line. She says she’s tried Larry twice this week and can’t raise him. I’m putting her through.”

“Deb?” Kim said. “I’m sorry to chase you down at work. My adjuster still has not walked your north eighty. Please tell me nobody has put a combine in it.”

That was when the cold went down my back.

The north eighty had taken the worst of that windstorm. A third of it was flat on the ground. I had walked it myself the next morning and I had written the note that was sitting on the inside cover of the red folder, in capitals so he could not miss it. Call Kim at the agency before you combine the north eighty.

Kim has written our crop insurance for twelve years, and I was the only one in our house she had ever dealt with. The policy wants notice inside seventy-two hours of finding damage, and I had given that the day after the storm. But she had told me twice that the adjuster needed to see that corn standing, or lying, before a combine went through it. Once it is in the bin it is just short bushels and your word.

Larry had not called. I knew he had not, because Larry had never called Kim in his life. He did not have her number in his phone. He was not careless about that field. He just had never known it was a thing that had to be done, because for twelve years it had been done.

I flipped my light to red.

“Not yet,” I said. “He’s moving up there at one o’clock.”

“Oh, for heaven’s sake,” Kim said. “Hold on.” I could hear her keyboard. “I can have the adjuster there at two. Can you keep him out of it till two?”

“I can.”

Then I called Larry from the counter phone. He picked up this time. I could hear the combine winding down behind him.

“Don’t open the north eighty,” I said. “The adjuster has to walk it first. He’ll be there at two. Go finish the corner by the creek on the home place, or grease something.”

There was a long quiet on the line.

“That was the note,” he said. “On the inside cover.”

“That was the note.”

“What would it have cost? If I’d gone in.”

“Kim thinks the claim on that field could run eleven thousand dollars,” I said. “Maybe a little better.”

He let out a breath.

“I’ve got a truck on the scale,” I said, and I turned my light back to green.

I was not trying to teach him a lesson. I will say that to anyone. I caught it because it was my farm, and my eleven thousand dollars, and because he was my husband and I did not want him to feel the way he would have felt.

But I noticed that I was the one who caught it. And so, I think, did he.

Friday, Dale threw his back out lifting a tarp.

I did not know it until twenty minutes to five. It was the busiest hour of the busiest day of the week. I had eleven trucks in line, tandems and semis, strung out past the feed mill to the highway, and the sun coming low and orange through the dust.