The Corn Dad Hauled Himself

Dumping

Dad pulled the red truck over the pit. He set the brake, and then, because he could not reach the tailgate latch from the cab and because there was no point pretending, he looked at Randy.

Randy went around to the back and pulled the pin on the end gate. Dad raised the hoist. The box tipped up slow, the old hydraulic cylinder groaning, and the corn slid out the back in a long yellow rush through the grate and down into the pit, the dust rising gold in the afternoon light.

I watched my father watch his corn go. His face was perfectly still. Randy stood at the back of the truck with his hand on the end gate, and I saw him wipe his eyes with the back of his wrist and pretend it was the dust.

When the box was empty Dad lowered it, and drove back across the scale for the empty weight, and Kim handed the ticket up through the window.

The ticket

It was a plain white slip of paper, the kind the scale printer spits out a thousand times a fall. Gross weight, tare weight, net. Moisture, fifteen point one. Test weight, fifty-seven. Net, 18,480 pounds. Three hundred thirty bushels.

At the top, in blue ink from the printer, it said: Vollmer, Floyd.

Dad read it all the way through. Then he folded it once, carefully, along the crease, and put it in the left breast pocket of his shirt, under his coat, and buttoned the pocket.

“First load,” he said.

The rest of it

We hauled ten loads in two days. Dad drove five and Randy drove five. Dad never once climbed into the box. Randy pulled every end gate pin, and when Dad’s wrist got stiff on the second afternoon, Randy drove the red truck and Dad rode along beside him, the way Mom used to.

I followed in my car, because somebody had to, and because I wanted to see it.

The twenty acres made 3,240 bushels. Dad paid Hollis for the seed out of the corn check, in full, at the kitchen table, with a check he wrote out in his slow, square handwriting. Orville would not take a dime. So Dad paid him in apple pie, two of them, which I baked and Dad delivered.

The café

What I did not expect was the café.

Dad kept that first scale ticket in his shirt pocket all week. Every morning at the round table by the window, he would take it out, unfold it, and lay it on the table for whoever had not seen it yet.

“Three hundred thirty bushels,” he would say. “Fifteen point one moisture. Off twenty acres of Tammy’s brome.”

The old men at that table have seen ten thousand scale tickets between them. Every one of them read it like it was a letter from home.

Deb, the waitress, told me later that he showed it to her four times. She said she pretended it was the first time every time, and that the fourth time she cried a little in the kitchen.

On Friday morning Randy came into the café.

He does not usually go there. He gets his coffee at the gas station on the way to the shop. But that Friday he walked in and stood by the round table with his cap in his hand, and the old men got quiet, because they all knew.

Dad had the ticket out on the table, the way he did.

“Morning, Dad,” Randy said.

“Morning.”

Randy looked around the table at those men. Men who had known him since he was in diapers. Men who had heard, every one of them, what he said in March about a man of 81.

“I want to say something,” Randy said, “and then I’ll get out of your hair.”

Nobody said anything.

“Last spring I sold Dad’s bins while he was in the hospital,” Randy said. “I told everybody he had no business farming anymore. I was wrong about that. I was scared and I was wrong, and I did it behind his back, which was the worst part.” He looked at Dad. “He’s not done. He hauled five loads this week. I watched him.”

It was very quiet in the café.

Then old Harold Lutz, who is ninety and does not hear well, said loudly, “Well, sit down then, Randy, you’re blocking the window.”

The whole table laughed. Randy sat down. Deb brought him a cup without asking.

Dad slid the ticket across the table to him.

“Fifteen point one,” Dad said. “Look at that.”

Randy picked it up and read it like he had never seen a scale ticket before in his life.