The Bookkeeper Across the Tracks

The Night Craig Wanted to Go

Craig came home at six that night with grain dust in the creases of his neck and the smell of axle grease on his hands.

He had been up in the head house most of the day, getting the leg ready for beans.

I told him while he washed up at the kitchen sink. I told it plain, the way it happened. Cindy in my chair. Twenty-five. The scale. Ten.

He stood there with the water running and his hands dripping and didn’t say anything for a long time. Then he turned off the faucet very carefully, the way you do when you would rather slam something.

“He offered you ten dollars,” Craig said.

“He did.”

“That’s under minimum.”

“I know it is.”

Craig dried his hands on the dish towel and reached for his truck keys on the hook by the door.

He had his jaw set the way his father sets his. I have seen that jaw on both of them for twenty-three years.

“Craig,” I said. “Sit down a minute.”

“I’m going over there.”

“I know you are. Sit down first.”

He sat. He’s a good man.

He has always been willing to sit down when I ask him, which is more than I can say for a lot of men, and more than I can say for myself some days.

I told him why I didn’t want him to go. His paycheck came from his father.

So did the elevator, someday, the whole of it, every bin and every bushel. Harold was seventy-two and had a new wife and a heart doctor in Sioux Falls.

“If you go over there tonight,” I said, “you’re going to say things you can’t take back. And then you’re going to have to work beside him every day of harvest. I won’t do that to you. Not two weeks out.”

“So you’re going to scale trucks for ten dollars an hour.”

“No,” I said. “I’m not going to do that either.”

He looked at me then. He had been married to me long enough to know when I had already decided something.

“I’m going to train her,” I said. “Two weeks. I’m going to teach her everything Joan taught me. And then I’m going to go see Dale at the co-op. They’ve been short a bookkeeper since July.”

Craig rubbed his face with both hands. “Dad’s going to hate that.”

“Maybe,” I said. “But it’ll be his choice that did it, not mine. And you won’t have had to say one word.”

He didn’t like it. I could see he didn’t.

But he put the keys back on the hook, and that night he held onto my hand in his sleep the way he did when Kyle was sick as a baby.