The Bookkeeper Across the Tracks

Harold told me on a Tuesday in September, in the elevator office, with the scale ticket printer still warm from the last truck of the morning.

Cindy was already sitting in my chair. She had her purse in her lap and her knees together, like a woman waiting at the doctor’s office, and she would not quite look at me.

“Lori,” Harold said, “you got a minute?”

I had a minute. I had nineteen years of minutes in that office. I set my coffee down on the filing cabinet and waited for him to tell me whatever it was.

“Cindy’s going to take over the books,” he said. “She needs something of her own. I’m going to start her at twenty-five an hour.”

He said the number the way a man says the price of a used truck he already decided to buy. Not proud of it. Not sorry about it. Just done.

“And you can help out on the scale,” he went on. “Weigh the trucks, pull the probe, hand out the tickets. Ten an hour. Easier on you, too. Less to keep track of.”

I looked at the window that faces the scale. There was a smear on the glass where I had leaned my forehead every harvest for nineteen years, waiting on the next truck in the dark.

Ten dollars an hour is under the South Dakota minimum wage now. I knew that because I was the one who did the payroll.

I don’t think Harold knew it. Harold had not looked at a payroll sheet since his father died.

“Okay,” I said.

That was all I said. Cindy looked up at me then, quick, and back down at her purse. Harold nodded like we had settled the price of seed corn and went back out to the yard.

I picked up my coffee. It had gone cold. I drank it anyway, because I did not know what else to do with my hands.

Nineteen Years of Twelve Dollars

I started at Brandt Grain in the spring of 2007. Craig and I had been married four years. Our boy Kyle was in kindergarten, and the dental office in Brookings had cut me back to two days.

Harold’s father, Walt, still came in every morning then, though he was past eighty. He was the one who set my pay. He sat me down at that same desk and said, “Twelve dollars an hour, and you’ll earn every penny.”

Twelve dollars was good money in 2007, in a town of nine hundred people in east-central South Dakota. The minimum wage was five eighty-five. I went home and told Craig we were rich.

Walt died in 2009. Harold took over.

And my pay stayed twelve dollars an hour, every year, through two new grain bins, a new leg, a new truck scale, and the price of everything in the world going up but me.

I want to be fair to Harold, because I have had a long time to think about it.

I never asked for a raise. Not once. It was family. You didn’t ask family for money. You just did the work.

And I did the work. Scale tickets, settlement sheets, deferred price contracts, the daily position report that has to balance to the bushel or the state warehouse inspector will want to know why.

Every check that went out the door went through my hands.

The person who taught me all of it was Joan, Harold’s first wife. She had kept the books for twenty years before me.

When her back got too bad to sit all day, she sat beside me instead, every morning for six months, with a cup of tea and a pencil.

Joan died in 2019. Pancreatic cancer, fast, the way it goes. Harold didn’t come into the office for most of a year.

Craig ran the place and I kept the books, and nobody talked about money because nobody talked about anything.

Then last winter, at a Lutheran church supper in Arlington, Harold met Cindy. She was fifty-eight, a widow, he told us, or something like it.

They were married at the courthouse in May. Craig and I stood up for them.

I liked her well enough. She was quiet and neat and she brought a pan of bars to every family supper.

She did not talk about her life before Harold, and I did not ask. That is how we are out here.