The Last Load Out of Delmore

“Last one, Ansel?”

“Last one.”

She hugged me, which she has never done in thirty years of my hauling her crop, and she did not look me in the eye. I took that for sentiment.

The week before, I had called Orlan Sprouse at the Delmore co-op and asked him straight out. “No party, Orlan. No cake. No speeches. Just weigh me in.”

“Wouldn’t dream of it,” he said.

He said it too fast, same as Luanne. I am sixty-eight years old and I still cannot catch a thing until it is behind me.

I turned onto the Delmore blacktop at 6:41 that Thursday.

The sun was a hand’s width over the milo, and the heads on the stalks had gone that dark rust color they get at harvest. I had the window down, as I always do, for the smell of dust and diesel and cut stalks. It is the best smell there is.

The radio was silent. That was bothering me. On a harvest morning there are twenty drivers on channel 19 at this hour, complaining about diesel and warning each other about the sheriff’s car behind the church in Gypsum. I thought, a man ought to retire with a working radio.

Then I came over the little rise at Mulberry Road, and there was a truck parked on the shoulder.

It was a red Freightliner with the hazards going, nosed up against the ditch, and a woman standing on the running board of the cab with her cap in her hand. She was holding something else in the other hand, held upright against her shoulder like a man holding a rifle at a funeral.

A hickory club.

She did not wave. She did not smile. She watched me come, and when the front of my truck went by her, she stepped down from the running board, swung that thumper in a short, hard stroke, and hit her own left front tire.

I heard it through the open window, over the engine. A hollow, flat, honest sound.

Tok.

In the mirror I watched her watch me go, with her cap held against her chest.

I knew her, of course. That was Jodene Stucky.

Jodene Stucky was twenty-four years old in the spring of 1994 and the best natural cattle hauler I have ever seen. I do not mean one of the best women. I mean one of the best.

She grew up on a feedlot near Marquette and could read a pen of steers like the front page of the paper. She got her license at twenty-one, and the Delmore Farmers Co-op, which dispatched most of the livestock work in the east half of the county, would not put her on a cattle load.

The manager was Merlin Kasper. Not a cruel man. He had run the co-op for twenty-six years, and he had a view of how things were done that nobody had ever asked him to examine. He said the producers wouldn’t like it. He said it was nothing against Jodene, it was just the way the business worked. She could haul grain.

She hauled grain for a year. It paid less, and it was the same road every day to the same bin.

I was hauling for the co-op then, too, about half my work. One morning I was waiting at the scale and I saw her come in with a load of wheat and her jaw set so hard that I could see the muscle. I went into the office, where Merlin was, and I said to him, plain as I’m saying it to you: “I’ll haul for the co-op when Jodene Stucky hauls for the co-op. All of it. Cattle too.”