The Five Dollar Bill at the Co-op

“No,” I said. “It doesn’t.”

By Wednesday I had a better answer than talking.

That spring my company won the bid for the co-op’s new storage site south of town, off the county road past the ethanol plant. It was the biggest job we have ever had. Four long ground-pile bunkers, each one longer than a football field.

If you’re not from farm country, a ground pile is about what it sounds like. When the tall concrete silos at the elevator fill up at harvest, the co-op has to put the rest of the corn somewhere.

So you build a long rectangle of precast concrete wall panels, pour a floor, and stack the corn right on it under the open sky.

Later in the fall they cover each pile with heavy white tarps and hold them down with tire walls and fans, and the corn keeps until spring when the trains can take it. In a big year it’s the difference between farmers hauling or farmers sitting.

My crew set every one of those wall panels. We poured every yard of the floors, with the aeration channels down the middle, and the truck scale pad by the scale house, and the drive-over pit where the trucks dump. Eleven weeks in the heat.

One day in the middle of July, Katie had a half day and Owen came out with her to bring me lunch. He was nine then, all elbows.

He’d never seen that much concrete in one place, and we’d been pouring since four that morning to beat the heat and he stood at the edge of the scale pad with his mouth hanging open.

Luis, my finisher, was working the last corner of the scale pad that afternoon. He saw Owen watching, and he waved him over and handed him a ten-penny nail out of his apron.

“Initials, little man,” Luis said. “Small. Right here in the corner where the tires won’t hit too hard. That’s how you sign a job.”

Owen looked at me like he was asking permission to rob a bank. I nodded.

He knelt down on the plywood and scratched O.K. into the corner of the slab, Owen Lindqvist with the K backwards at first, until Luis showed him how to smooth it and do it right.

Owen talked about that for a month. He told his whole class he signed a scale. He told Dale at Sunday dinner, and Dale said that’s nice and passed the potatoes.

Harvest came in big this year. Everybody said so at the café, at church, at the parts counter. Yields were up even with the dry August, and prices were down, which is how it seems to go.

The co-op’s concrete silos in town were full by the first of October. Every bushel brought in after that was going across the scale I poured and onto the floors I poured.

I knew that because Randy, the site manager, called me on the second of October to say the north bunker was filling faster than anybody had planned.

So on Wednesday night after supper I called Randy back.

“I got a favor to ask,” I said. “Saturday. I want to bring my boy out. Just to look.”

Randy didn’t ask why. He’s about fifty, been with the co-op since he was a kid unloading boxcars. He just said, “Bring him in daylight so he can see it right. And tell him to wear boots.”

When I told Katie, she was quiet for a minute. She was folding towels on the bed and she folded one twice.