“Dad hauls his own when the driver’s gone,” she said. “Kevin quit last Friday. Mom told me. Dad’s been running the combine till dark and hauling in the morning.”
“I know.”
“Ben. If this is about Dad.”
“It’s about Owen,” I said. “I’m not going to say a word to your father. I didn’t on Sunday and I’m not going to now.”
She looked at me a long time. Then she nodded and went back to her towels. “Take him a thermos,” she said. “Randy’s coffee is terrible.”
On Saturday I woke Owen at six. He rolled over and looked at me like I’d lost my mind.
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
“Wear your boots,” I said. “We’re going to work.”
He got dressed in the dark, sandy hair sticking up on one side. Jeans, his gray hoodie, the boots Katie bought him a size too big in August.
He didn’t ask where we were going. He just climbed in the pickup and fell back asleep with his head against the window.
I wore an old hi-vis company T-shirt under my coat. Habit. Every man on a job site wears one, and I wanted Owen to see where I go every day, the real version, not the one Dale talks about.
You could see the site from a mile away. The four bunkers sit low on the flat ground like long gray bowls, and two of them were heaped so high with corn they looked like golden hills dropped on the prairie.
The sky was wide and blue, not a cloud. October in Nebraska can be the prettiest thing God ever made, and that Saturday was one of those days. Bright and dry and a little breeze out of the south.
We parked by the scale house a little after eight.
The truck line ran back past the county road and down the shoulder, maybe forty deep. Semis with white trailers, farm tandems, a couple of straight trucks so old the paint had gone chalky. Men stood by their cabs in chore coats with coffee, talking with their hands.
Two stackers were running. A stacker is a long steel conveyor up on legs, tall as a grain leg, that swings out over the bunker and drops the corn on the top of the pile.
Corn poured off the belts in a gold stream you could hear from the truck, a steady hiss like rain on a tin roof.
The air smelled like corn dust. If you grew up out here, you know that smell. Sweet and dry and a little like a feed store, and it gets in your nose and your clothes for a week.
Owen got out of the pickup and walked straight to the wall of the north bunker and stood there with his mouth open. The pile on the north bunker was taller than our house, maybe a good bit taller.
The top of it was up in the sunlight and the corn on top was steaming a little where the dust caught the light.
“Dad,” he said. “Did you make this?”
“My crew did. Luis and me and the guys. Not the corn. The bowl it’s sitting in.”
He put his hand on the concrete wall panel. It was already warm from the sun. He left his hand there a long time, the way you’d put your hand on a horse.
Randy, the site manager, came out of the scale house with two coffees and a hot chocolate in a stack of paper cups. He had on a co-op jacket and a cap so dusty you couldn’t tell what color it started.