The Bookkeeper Across the Tracks

Cindy was not slow. I want that said. She learned the scale tickets in a day and the contracts in three. But the position report scared her, and it should have. It scared me for my whole first year.

Once, near the end of the first week, she looked up from the adding machine and asked me something out of nowhere.

“How long did it take you to feel like you knew what you were doing?”

“About two harvests,” I said.

She nodded slowly. “I don’t have two harvests,” she said, so quietly I almost didn’t hear it. Then she bent back over her work, and I didn’t ask what she meant.

Harold came in and out of the office every day. He was polite to me. He asked how Cindy was getting along.

He did not mention the scale, or the ten dollars, and I didn’t either. I think he thought I was going to take it.

On the last Friday, I cleaned out my desk drawer. A box of paper clips that was mine.

A photo of Kyle in his Arlington football uniform. A coffee mug from the Lake Poinsett Bible camp. A hand lotion. That was nineteen years.

I set my office keys on the desk blotter, the big ring with the scale house key and the bin key and the key to the safe. Cindy watched me do it.

“You’re not going to do the scale,” she said. It wasn’t a question.

“No,” I said. “I’ve taken a job at the co-op. I start Monday.”

She opened her mouth and closed it again. Then she said, “Does Harold know?”

“Not yet,” I said. “I’m going to tell him on the way out.”

I found him in the yard by the dump pit, looking at the sky the way every elevator man looks at the sky in September.

I told him. I told him I was grateful for the years and I’d be across the tracks if Cindy got stuck.

He looked at me for a long moment, and then he looked past me, at the co-op’s tall concrete bins across the railroad.

“Well,” he said. “I guess that’s your business.”

“I guess it is,” I said. And I walked across the tracks with my box.

Across the Tracks

The co-op elevator sits maybe four hundred yards from Brandt Grain, on the other side of the main line. It is bigger than ours.

Concrete bins instead of steel, a bigger dryer, a grain leg that can run twice what ours can on a good day.

Dale Peterson had managed it for eleven years.

He was a big, slow-talking man with a seed cap that said nothing on it, because his wife had picked the logo off with a seam ripper after he complained about wearing advertising.

He had offered me twenty-two dollars an hour on the phone, plus health insurance, which I had never had through Brandt’s because I was on Craig’s.

When I came in on Monday he shook my hand and showed me the desk.

“You’ll do the books,” he said. “But I’ll be honest with you, Lori. At harvest everybody here runs the scale. The bookkeeper too. We’re short-handed and we’ve been short-handed since my last girl moved to Sioux Falls.”

“I’ve run a scale before,” I said.

“I know you have,” he said, and smiled. “I’ve been watching you run one from across those tracks for nineteen years.”

The scale house at the co-op is a little block building with a sliding window at truck-cab height.

You lean out with the ticket and the farmer leans down from the cab and takes it. In September the window is open from six in the morning until well after dark.

The co-op’s books were in rough shape. The girl before me had been good, but she had been gone two months and Dale had been doing it himself at night.

I spent my first week just catching up the settlement sheets and the position report.

It was strange how easy it was. Not the work. The work was work. What was easy was going home at five-thirty and not thinking about it.

Nobody at the co-op was family. Nobody owed me anything but my check, and the check was right.