The Corn Dad Hauled Himself

The combine

Orville came with his combine on the fourteenth of October, a clear dry Wednesday with almost no wind. The corn had dried down nicely in the field. Orville checked a few ears with his moisture tester and said it was running about fifteen percent, which meant no drying charge at the elevator.

Dad pulled the red truck up to the end of the field at nine in the morning. He wore his faded green seed cap and his tan chore coat, the one with the corduroy collar Mom had patched twice. He looked like every fall of my childhood.

Orville made his first round, and the combine’s hopper filled, and he swung the unloading auger over Dad’s truck box. Yellow corn poured out in a long golden stream, and Dad stood on the ground beside the truck with his hands in his coat pockets and watched it come.

I stood next to him. I did not say anything. I did not trust my voice.

Orville filled the truck in two hopper loads and leveled it off heaped. He leaned out of the combine cab and gave Dad a thumbs up. Dad touched the brim of his cap.

“Well,” Dad said. “Let’s go to town.”

The line

I rode with him. He did not ask me to, but he did not tell me not to, either. Hollis stayed behind to move the pickup and help Orville at the field.

The co-op elevator sits on the north edge of town by the railroad tracks, a long row of tall concrete silos and a newer steel annex. In October there is always a line. That afternoon there were two semis at the dump and a short row of trucks waiting behind the scale house.

Dad pulled in behind a green tandem truck and shut the engine off to wait. It was quiet in the cab. Through the windshield I could see the silos white against a sky so blue it hurt to look at.

“I didn’t think I’d sit in this line again,” Dad said. “Not after March. I figured that last load in February was the last one.”

“I know, Dad.”

“Fifty-one years I’ve been hauling to this elevator. Her daddy hauled here before me.” He tapped the steering wheel with one finger. “Randy hauled here in this truck when he was fifteen. He backed it into the scale house.”

I laughed. I had forgotten that.

The man in the green tandem truck ahead of us got out to stretch his legs. He was one of the Pohlman brothers, a man about my age. He looked back at the red truck, looked again, and then walked back to Dad’s window.

“Floyd,” he said. “That your corn?”

“It is,” Dad said.