The Corn Dad Hauled Himself

On the scale

When it was our turn, Dad started the truck and eased it up onto the scale, and I got out to walk around to his side the way Mom used to, to be there when the scale man came out.

Kim Brandt was working the scale house that day. She has worked there twenty years, and she came out with the long probe to take a sample from the load. She looked up at Dad in the cab, and her face did something I will not forget.

“Floyd Vollmer,” she said. “Well, look at you.”

She took her sample, and Dad sat with both hands on the wheel, and I stood by the open driver’s door with my hand on it.

It was a clear October afternoon and there were two grain trucks waiting in line behind us, and I looked at my father in his green cap and his tan coat at the wheel of his red truck heaped with his own corn, and I thought, there he is. There he is.

Then I heard a truck door open behind us.

The Pohlman brother had climbed down from his tandem, which was parked off to the side now, and he was walking toward us. Behind him, the driver of the next truck in line had gotten out too. Then the man in the semi at the dump.

They did not make a fuss. That is not how men like that do things. They walked up one by one to Dad’s window, and each one reached up and shook his hand. Pohlman. A Hester cousin. An old man I did not know, who had to be close to Dad’s age, who just said, “Good to see you hauling, Floyd,” and walked back to his truck.

Dad shook every hand. He did not say much. He said “Thank you” and “Good to see you” and “Yep, Orville planted it.” His good hand was steady. His eyes were not.

Kim leaned out of the scale house window. “Floyd, you’re holding up my line,” she said, smiling, and Dad laughed and put the truck in gear.

The second truck

He was pulling forward toward the dump pit when I saw it.

Coming in off the highway, slow, was a faded blue grain truck I did not recognize, a tandem with plywood sideboards, heaped with yellow corn. It pulled into the line behind the others. The driver’s door opened, and my brother climbed down.

I stood there with my mouth open.

Randy walked up past the waiting trucks. The men who had shaken Dad’s hand watched him come. Everybody in that line knew what Randy had done in March. In a town that size, everybody knows everything by Thursday.

He did not look at any of them. He walked straight to where I was standing beside Dad’s truck at the edge of the pit.

“Where’d you get that truck,” I said.

“Borrowed it off a customer,” Randy said. “Orville loaded me out of the combine an hour ago. Hollis said you’d already left.”

“How did you know to come?”

Randy looked up at Dad in the cab.

“He called me,” Randy said. “Last night. Ten o’clock. First time he’s called me since March.”

I looked at Dad. Dad was looking straight ahead through the windshield at the dump pit grate.

“I asked him to haul the second load,” Dad said, to nobody in particular. “Twenty acres is too much corn for one old man and one old truck.”

Randy put his hand on the door of the red truck, just under the window, right beside where mine had been.

“I’ll take the next four after this one too,” he said. “You can sit in the cab and supervise.”

Dad nodded slowly. “I’ll be watching your backing,” he said. “Mind the scale house.”

My brother laughed. It was the first time I had heard him laugh in seven months, and it came out of him rough, like something that had been stuck.