The Bookkeeper Across the Tracks

What I said to Dwight that morning was this: “Brandt’s is a good elevator. Harold’s honest and Cindy’s learning. Give her a week.”

Dwight looked at me for a moment from up in his cab. Then he said, “I’ll give her a week from over here,” and he drove onto the scale.

Elmer Mertz came that afternoon. Tom Olson came on Monday. Tom told me later he’d been short a hundred and twelve dollars on a check, and his wife Barb had said, “Just go where Lori is.” Neither of them had ever hauled to the co-op in their lives.

Three farmers does not sound like much.

But at a small elevator three steady farmers in harvest can be a sixth of what goes through the pit, and every bushel that doesn’t come across your scale is a bushel you don’t earn a handling margin on.

Dale didn’t say anything about it, except once. He came by the scale house with two cups of coffee and handed me one and said, “I didn’t hire you to steal Harold’s customers.”

“I’m not stealing them,” I said.

“I know you’re not,” he said. “That’s the thing about it. You’re not doing a single thing. They’re doing it.” He sipped his coffee. “Harold’s going to have to think about that.”

On Tuesday evening, about seven, the sun went down orange behind the bins and the yard lights came on.

There was grain dust hanging in the light the way it does in harvest, gold and slow, like snow that can’t decide to fall.

Dwight pulled in with his last load of the day.

I leaned out the scale window with his ticket and he reached down for it from the cab of his red truck, and he touched the brim of his cap the way he always does.

Then I looked across the tracks.

Harold was standing by the tracks, in front of his old wooden elevator. There was one pickup in his lot. One. On a harvest evening in late September when there should have been four trucks in line.

He was in his flat cap and a plaid work shirt, and he was just standing there watching me. He watched a long time. He didn’t wave. And I didn’t wave either.

I’m not proud of that. I’ve thought about it since. He was an old man standing alone by the rails, and I was his son’s wife, and I didn’t lift my hand.

I told myself he was too far off to see it. He wasn’t.

I went home that night and couldn’t sleep. Craig was out cold beside me.

I lay there and thought about Joan, and what she would have said if she’d seen her husband standing alone by those tracks. I thought she would have been ashamed of both of us.