The Five Dollar Bill at the Co-op

“This the young man with his initials in my scale?”

Owen went red to the ears. He looked at me and then at Randy and didn’t say anything. He took the hot chocolate with both hands.

“Come on,” Randy said. “I’ll show you. Stay on the walkway, the trucks don’t stop for anybody.”

Randy walked us to the corner of the pad. There was a lull in the line while the man at the pit finished, and the scale sat empty for a minute, a long gray slab with steel guard rails.

There it was. O.K., down in the corner.

It was worn in now from a thousand tires going by the edge, softened like an old penny, but you could read it plain. Owen squatted down and touched it with one finger, tracing the K he’d done backwards first.

“I forgot about it,” he said.

“Well, it didn’t forget about you,” Randy said. “Every truck in this county has rolled past it this month. That’s a lot of corn signed by you.”

He crouched down beside Owen. Randy is a big man and his knees popped. He pointed across the site at the four bunkers.

“You know what we’d be doing without these floors?” he said. “Without these floors, half the county would be dumping on the ground right now. On bare dirt. Or they’d be sitting in their yards with full trucks and their combines parked, waiting on us.”

He tapped the slab with a knuckle.

“Your dad’s crew gave us three million bushels of room. You understand how much that is?”

Owen shook his head.

“Me neither, really,” Randy said. “But it’s a lot of Christmas presents for a lot of farm kids.”

Owen laughed. It was the first time I’d heard him laugh, really laugh, since Sunday. I had to turn around and look at the stacker for a while.

We stayed all morning. Randy let Owen stand in the scale house and watch the numbers come up on the screen as each truck rolled on.

Gross weight, then a man with a long steel probe would pull a sample from the load, and the girl at the window ran it for moisture and test weight.

Owen learned more about corn that morning than he’d learned in ten years of Sunday dinners. That 15 percent moisture is about where you want it. That a bushel of shelled corn weighs 56 pounds. That a truck weighs on the way in and weighs again empty on the way out, and the difference is what the farmer gets paid for.

“So the scale is the most important part,” he said.

“Don’t tell the man who poured the pit,” Randy said, and winked at me.

The scale house had a coffee maker on a filing cabinet and a box of donuts from the Casey’s that somebody’s wife had dropped off. Farmers came in to hand over tickets and stayed five minutes to talk about yields and the price and whose combine had broken down where.

Katie was right. Randy’s coffee was terrible. I drank two cups of it anyway and saved her thermos for later.

A man named Jeff, who farms north of Dale’s place, came in and shook Owen’s hand when Randy told him who signed the scale. He knew him from church.

By eleven-thirty the sun was high and there was hardly a shadow anywhere on the site. The line had moved and filled and moved and filled. Owen had walked every inch of walkway Randy would let him and he’d stopped asking questions and started just watching.