The Bookkeeper Across the Tracks

Harvest

Beans started coming the last week of September. It came all at once the way it does, a dry warm week after a wet one, and every combine in the county rolled out the same Monday morning.

By Wednesday there were trucks lined up on both sides of the tracks.

I could see Brandt’s yard from my scale window, and I could see Craig up on the catwalk, and I could see the light on in the office until ten at night.

I heard about the first trouble from Craig on Thursday. He came home late and sat down at the table without taking off his boots, which he never does.

“She couldn’t close Tuesday,” he said. “Or Wednesday. Position report’s off. Fourteen hundred bushels, somewhere.”

“Fourteen hundred,” I said. That’s most of a semi load. “Did she check the bin readings against the tickets?”

“I don’t know what she checked. Dad was in there yelling at the adding machine.” He rubbed his eyes. “I’m not supposed to tell you any of this.”

“Then don’t,” I said. And I got up and heated him a plate, and we didn’t talk about it anymore that night.

It was Dwight Larson who came across first. Dwight is seventy, farms eleven hundred acres north of town with his son, and had hauled every bushel he ever raised to Brandt Grain.

His father hauled there before him, back when Walt ran it.

He pulled his red International onto the co-op scale on Friday morning at six-forty, with the sun barely up. I slid open the window. He leaned down out of the cab and held up an envelope.

“My settlement check from Brandt’s,” he said. “It’s three hundred eighty dollars short. Shrink’s figured at the wrong moisture. I called up there and Cindy said she’d look into it, and Harold said she was new, and I said I know she’s new, but I’m not.”

“Dwight,” I said, “you know they’ll make that right.”

“I know they will,” he said. “Eventually. I’ve got fourteen loads to haul this week and I’m not going to chase every one of them. I don’t trust anybody’s numbers but yours, Lori.”

I did not ask him to come. I want that understood, because people talk in a town of nine hundred, and some of them said I did.

I never called a single farmer. I never said one word against Brandt Grain to anybody.