Five Thousand Dollars At The Elevator Scale

He thought about it. “Can I come on the last night? To see the last truck?”

I looked at Amber. She was buttering toast for Jolie, who was two and had opinions about how toast should be cut. Amber shrugged with one shoulder.

“We’ll see,” I said. Which to a four year old means yes.

About halfway through October, on a Sunday when it rained and we couldn’t go, I sat at the kitchen table with a pencil and an elevator calendar and did some arithmetic I wish I hadn’t done.

A custom operator around here charges about thirty five dollars an acre to combine corn. Some charge more.

By the time we finished, I’d have run the combine on something like six hundred acres of Curtis’s ground at night.

Six hundred acres at thirty five dollars was twenty one thousand dollars.

Even if you took off fuel, which was his, and the machine, which was his, my labor alone was worth a lot more than five thousand dollars. Any farmer in Cottonwood County could have told him that.

I’m not writing that down to make Curtis look bad. When I saw it on paper, I knew the money had never been the thing. If it was about money, I’d have been the one with a bill.

It was about the word. He’d called it a gift. A gift is the nicest thing one man can say to another.

And then he’d taken the word back and made it a payment plan, because he couldn’t stand to ask for help he couldn’t pay for.

I put the pencil down and looked at the coffee can on the top shelf, which I’d brought down to count. Five thousand dollars, folded, waiting for two years for a reason.

And I knew what to do with it.

I told her that night in bed, in the dark, with the rain still going on the roof.

“I’m going to give it back to him,” I said. “The cash. All of it. On the last night, after the last load.”

She was quiet for a long time. “Brett. You’re paying him five thousand dollars for the privilege of working for free for a month.”

“No,” I said. “Listen. If I hand him the money, then the five thousand is paid back. It was a loan, he got his loan back. And then the nights I ran his combine aren’t payment for anything. They’re just mine. They’re my gift to him. A gift is a gift. He taught me that.”

She turned over and looked at me in the dark. I could see the shape of her face against the window. Then she laughed, just a little, the way she does when she’s surprised.

“He’s going to hate that,” she said.

“I don’t want him to hate it. I want him to understand it.”

“Then give it to him at the elevator,” she said. “Where there’s people around. Not at the farm. If you do it at the farm, he’ll make a speech and walk off. At the elevator he’ll have to stand there and take it.”

I didn’t love the idea of people seeing. But she knew her brother.

“And I’m bringing the kids,” Amber said. “Jace asked. And I want to be there.”

We finished on a Wednesday, the twenty eighth of October. There’d been a hard frost that morning, and the stalks were dry and loud, and the corn was coming off at about eighteen percent moisture, which was good for this late.