The Scale He Had to Pull Onto

“My Joan did ours forty-four years,” he said. “I told people the same as you. She’s just home. She died a year ago March.” He stopped and worked his jaw. “It took me till the middle of June to find the checkbook. I paid the light bill twice and the taxes not at all. I found a note in her recipe box telling me which day the trash goes out.”

He put one big hand on Larry’s shoulder.

“I never told her what she was worth to that place, because I didn’t know it till she was gone. You know it today. You’ve got it right there on a piece of paper with her initials on it.” He gave the shoulder a small shake. “Don’t you wait like I did.”

Then he turned around and walked back to his truck, and one of the men by the fenders took his cap off as he went by.

Larry folded the ticket in half, and in half again, and buttoned it into his shirt pocket.

He looked at me through the window. His eyes were red, and it was not all dust.

“What time are you off?” he said.

“Seven.”

“I’ll have supper.”

“Larry, you’ve got corn to cut.”

“It’ll be there in the morning,” he said. “I’ll have supper.”

He climbed up in the truck and pulled off my scale. Don rolled on behind him.

“Seventy-nine thousand four hundred gross,” I said. My voice held. “Go ahead to the pit.”

When I got home at half past seven the combine was parked in the yard and the kitchen light was on.

He had made fried egg sandwiches. That is the one thing Larry can cook. He had burned the first batch, and the pan was soaking in the sink, and he had set the table with the good plates because he did not know which ones were the everyday.

He had also been in the office. The green ledgers were stacked on the table by the bread, all twenty-six of them.

We ate. Neither one of us said much until the plates were empty.

“I got those down to find the fuel account,” he said. “And then I couldn’t quit.”

He opened one. It was from the bad year, the one when the hail took the beans in July and we came up short on everything.

“You’ve got a line in here,” he said. He turned the book around and put his finger on it. “March the ninth. Sold piano, six hundred fifty dollars. Applied to seed.”

I looked at my own handwriting.

“That was your mother’s piano,” he said. “You told me you gave it to the piano teacher in town because nobody played it.”

“Nobody was going to play it if we didn’t get a crop in the ground.”

“You played it every Sunday afternoon of your life.”

“We needed seed, Larry.”

“I’d have found the money.”

“There wasn’t any to find. I was the one who knew that. You were already not sleeping.” I shrugged. “It was a piano.”

He shut the ledger and laid both hands flat on the cover.

“I’ve been sitting here two hours,” he said. “There’s one of those about every year. Not a piano. But something. You went without something, or you figured something, or you caught something, and you wrote it down in this little hand and never said a word about it.” He looked up. “I thought I was farming this place.”

“You are farming it.”