The Grain Truck Past My Father’s Field

Aaron

Aaron teaches ag at the high school and runs the FFA chapter. In October he is in a classroom from seven-thirty to three-thirty and then at the shop until six helping kids rebuild a small engine or practice for livestock judging. He cannot drive a grain truck for anybody during the week. That was never his job on our farm, and Dad never asked him.

He found me at the kitchen table at ten o’clock that night with a legal pad and a cold cup of coffee. “What are you doing?” he asked.

“Math,” I said. “Fourteen years of it.”

I had written fourteen years down the left side. Next to each one, as best I could remember, I had written how many days I hauled. Some years it was eighteen days. The wet year it was thirty-one. I had multiplied it out by twelve hours a day, which was low, because Dad does not stop the combine at five o’clock just because the sun does.

Aaron pulled out a chair and read it upside down, the way he reads his students’ tests when they hand them in. “That’s a lot of hours, Kel.”

“I’m not going to send him a bill,” I said. “I just wanted to see it.”

He was quiet for a minute. Then he said, “You know Marv Ostendorf’s driver quit.” I looked up from the legal pad.

“Dale,” Aaron said. “He took the job at the ethanol plant. Started last week. Marv was at the co-op on Friday asking around. He’s got his red International sitting in the shed with nobody to drive it, and he starts beans Tuesday.”

“Marv is seventy years old,” I said. “Who’s running his combine?”

“His grandson. Kid’s in my ag mechanics class. Good kid, can’t drive a truck yet.” Aaron folded his hands on the legal pad. “Marv’s paying twenty-two.”

I sat there for a long time, looking at the column of numbers. “He’ll think I’m doing it to shame Dad,” I said.

“Are you?”

“No.”

“Then you’re not.” He tapped the legal pad. “You told him. Tonight, at the table, in front of everybody. You asked him straight out. He said no. You’re allowed to hear a no.”

That was the thing I kept coming back to, later, when people asked me why I did not just talk to my father. I did talk to him. I asked him plainly, in his own kitchen, with my mother and my brother listening. He told me no in front of all of them.

There was nothing left to say to him that I had not already said at his own table. There was only something left to do.