The Knock on My Own Front Door
Part Seven: The Elevator
I drove him to the co-op elevator on the east edge of town. It is about a mile and a half. Neither one of us said a word the whole way.
I parked by the scale house, where I had parked nearly every working day for forty years. The concrete bins stood up white against a sky going pink in the west. The leg was quiet. In March there is not much moving except some corn going out on trucks.
I shut off the engine and we sat there.
“I started here in 1979,” I said. “Shoveling out bins. Two dollars and ninety cents an hour.”
“I know, Dad.”
“In 1985 they came within a vote of closing it. Half the farmers around here were going under. I was assistant manager by then, with a mortgage and no savings, and I didn’t get paid for six weeks.”
Brett turned and looked at me. He had never heard that part. Nobody had, except Ardis.
“Your grandpa lent us four hundred dollars to make the house payment,” I said. “I never told a soul. I was so ashamed I couldn’t look at him at church. I paid him back with interest he didn’t want and never said thank you properly, because saying it out loud would’ve meant admitting I needed it.”
Brett looked down at his cap in his hands.
“So I know a little something about not telling your father,” I said. “Now you tell me.”
He did. It came out slow at first, and then all at once, the way water comes out of a frozen pipe when it finally lets go.
The layoff on December 12. Three weeks of severance. The truck payment, $412 a month. Child support for Emma, his little girl, $380 a month, and he had never been one day late on it, not once since the divorce, and he was not about to start.
Unemployment covered some. The feed mill paid by the load, when they called. Then Jade’s lease ran out, and Austin lost his place, and Brett gave up his apartment over the bakery to save the rent.
“And the house was just sitting there,” he said. “Empty. And I thought, it’s three months. Austin pays six hundred, I keep up the truck and Emma’s money, I find something, and I put it all back before you ever come home. You’d never know.”
“You told Austin we gave you the house.”
“I know.” His voice broke on it. “I know I did. He asked if it was mine, and I just said yes. It was easier than the truth. Everything was easier than the truth.”
“Why didn’t you call me?”
He laughed, but there was nothing funny in it. “Dad. You never missed a day of work in forty years. You’ve got a plaque in there with your name on it. How was I supposed to call you in Arizona and say I’m thirty-six and I lost my job and I can’t make my truck payment?”
“You just say it.”
“You never said it,” he said quietly. “About Grandpa. Not for forty years.”
I sat there with that. He was right, and we both knew it.
So I did the only thing I know how to do. I got out of the car.
“Where are you going?” he said.
“In there. Come on.”
Jeff Ostrander, who runs the elevator now, was in the scale house finishing up the day’s tickets. I had hired him myself in 2001, a skinny kid out of the community college. He came around the counter and shook my hand like I was home from a war.
“Gordon! I thought you were in Arizona till May.”
“Change of plans,” I said. “Jeff, are you still looking for spring help? Somebody who’ll show up?”
He looked past me at Brett in the doorway. “Always. Fertilizer season starts in three weeks. Bins, loading, the dump pit, whatever comes up. Eighteen an hour, overtime in the busy weeks.”
I did not say anything else. I stepped aside.
That was the hardest thing I did that whole trip. Harder than the 1,480 miles. I stood next to the coffee pot and kept my mouth shut, and let my son ask for the job himself.
He did. He took his cap off and asked Jeff Ostrander for work in a clear voice, and told him straight out that he had been laid off from the cabinet plant in December and had been driving part time since.
Jeff said, “Can you be here Monday at seven?”
Brett said, “Yes, sir.”