Five Thousand Dollars At The Elevator Scale

The last field was the eighty behind the home place, where Curtis and Amber had played as kids.

I took the last eight rows into the lights at about twenty after ten, and the head went quiet, and I sat there for a second with my hands on the controls.

Curtis pulled the grain cart alongside one more time, and I unloaded on the go, and then I shut her down at the end of the field.

The quiet afterward was so big I could hear the engine ticking as it cooled.

Curtis climbed up the ladder and opened the cab door. He looked at me a long moment, and then he looked out at the stubble field under the moon.

“That’s it,” he said. “That’s the crop.”

“That’s the crop,” I said.

He augered the last of the cart into his old semi and grain trailer, and I rode along with him to town.

The elevator was staying open till midnight for harvest, the way it does the last couple weeks. It was a twenty minute drive in the dark, both of us quiet in the cab.

I texted Amber when we hit the highway. She texted back a picture of Jace and Jolie in the back seat of the pickup, already buckled in, in their pajamas, Jace in his blue print ones and Jolie in the dark blue ones with the stars.

Dale Hendricks was running the scale. Dale has run that scale since Curtis and Amber were in grade school.

He’s about seventy, with a flannel shirt and reading glasses on a cord, and he knew Gene Moe for forty years.

We pulled onto the scale and Dale probed the load and ran the sample, and through the open window he read off the moisture, a little under eighteen, and the test weight.

Then we pulled ahead to the pit and Curtis put the hoist up.

The corn went down the grates in that long hushing roar. I climbed out of the cab into the cold, and I saw the dark blue pickup pull in by the office and park under the lights, with Amber at the wheel and the kids in the back.

Curtis walked to the scale house door to get his ticket. That’s where he stopped and turned and said it one more time.

“Guess that squares us up on the five thousand.”

And that’s when I took the money out.

I held it out. The yard lights were on it, and you could see the corner of a hundred dollar bill and the folded edge of the stack.

Curtis stood in the scale house doorway in his tan coat and didn’t move his hands.

“What is that,” he said. Not like a question.

“That’s your five thousand,” I said. “Amber and me saved it. Saturdays, mostly. It took us two years. It’s been sitting in a coffee can on our closet shelf since the summer after the flood.”

“Brett. I told you that was a gift.”

“You did,” I said. “In April, two years ago, you told me it was a gift and not to insult you. And in August you told me to work it off. So I’m going to fix it so you were right the first time.”

He looked at me like he didn’t follow. Behind me, I heard the leg winding down as the last of the corn went in. Inside the scale house, Dale had turned the radio down.