Five Thousand Dollars At The Elevator Scale

Five thousand, even. I didn’t know yet what I was going to do with it.

Curtis took over the home place five years ago when their dad, Gene, died of a heart attack in the machine shed.

Curtis was thirty five. He’d been farming beside his dad since high school, but there’s a difference between helping and holding the note.

He kept all the rented ground his dad had. He bought a newer planter.

Then corn went down and stayed down, and inputs went up and stayed up, and the last two years were the kind a man farms through on hope and his operating line at the bank.

All I knew was that Curtis came to Gail’s for Sunday dinner looking like he hadn’t slept, and he didn’t eat his second piece of pie, which for Curtis is like a fever.

After dinner he asked me to come look at a hydraulic leak on his grain cart.

We walked out to his pickup in Gail’s driveway, and he leaned on the tailgate and didn’t say anything about a leak.

“Ray quit,” he said. Ray was his hired man of six years. “He took a job at the ethanol plant. Benefits. I don’t blame him. I can’t match it.”

“I’m sorry, Curt.”

“I need somebody on the combine nights this fall. I’ll run it days, then haul. I need a night man from about six till midnight or so, every night we can go, till it’s done.”

I knew what was coming. I think I knew before he did.

I could see him working up to it, rubbing his thumb along the edge of the tailgate where the paint was worn down to metal.

“I figured,” he said, “that five thousand from the flood. You could work that off. Run nights for me this fall, and we’ll call it even. Square.”

He didn’t look at me when he said it. He looked out across Gail’s yard at the elevator legs standing over the town, the way he always looked at things that hurt him.

I stood there with my hands in my pockets. A gift, he’d said. Don’t you dare insult me.

And now it was a debt with a payment plan, and the payment was my nights, all harvest, while my kids were asleep.

I could have argued. I could have said, Curtis, you told me it was a gift. But a gift is a gift.

There was nothing to sue over and nothing to fight about, and I was not going to stand in my mother-in-law’s driveway and fight my wife’s brother. All I could do was make it square.

“Okay,” I said. “I’ll run nights.”

He nodded and put his hand out, and I shook it. His hand was rough and cold.

I think he was relieved and ashamed at the same time, and I think he couldn’t tell which one was louder.

I told Amber that night in our kitchen after the kids were down.

She was wiping the counter, and when I said the words work it off, she stopped wiping and stood there with the rag in her hand.

“He said that,” she said. “He said work it off. After he told you it was a gift.”

“He said it.”

“I’m calling him.” She had her phone out already. Amber is quiet until she isn’t. “That’s my dad’s farm. That’s not how Dad would have done anybody, and he knows it.”

“Amber. Please don’t.”