The Corn I Hauled for Verna

“Mom, seventy acres is a day and a half I don’t have,” Kurt said, and he said it with his hand already on the screen door of his mother’s kitchen.

It was a Saturday noon in the third week of October. The sun came through the window over the sink and lay across the oilcloth on the table, where nobody had eaten much of the ham.

Verna Brockhoff sat at the head of that table, in the chair her husband Wendell had used for forty-nine years. She was seventy-eight. She had buried him in July, three days after his stroke in the machine shed.

“I’m not asking you to combine it,” she said. “Lyle said he’d run his combine for me. I’m asking you to haul it, Kurt. You always hauled for your dad.”

“I hauled for Dad when Dad was farming,” Kurt said. “Dad’s not farming. I’ve got three thousand acres booked between here and Kankakee, and every one of them pays.”

My wife, Annelie, put her fork down without a sound. She is two years older than her brother, and she has been putting her fork down quietly at that table her whole life.

“It pays too,” Verna said. “It’s my corn. It’s what I live on this winter.”

“Then sell the corn standing,” Kurt said. “Or rent the ground out next year like I told you. Mom, I can’t tie up a truck and a driver for your seventy acres in the middle of the best week of the season. It isn’t worth my time right now.”

He said it plain, not loud. That was worse. Loud I could have answered. He said it the way a man reads off a price at the feed store, and then he went out the door.

We heard his pickup start in the yard and go down the lane. Verna sat there with her hands folded on the oilcloth, looking at the place where his plate had been.

“He’s got that new combine,” she said after a while. “He’s worried about the note on it. He told me.”

She was making his excuse for him. Mothers do that. I have watched women do it at funerals and weddings and sale barns my whole life, and I have never once seen it make the thing any less wrong.

My name is Eldon Raske. I am fifty-two years old, and I have driven a semi for a feed and fertilizer hauler out of Bloomington for twenty-three years. Before that I grew up on a hog and grain place north of Fairbury.

I married into the Brockhoff family at twenty-six. Wendell Brockhoff never once called me his son-in-law. He called me Eldon, and he called me when he needed a hand, and that was how I knew where I stood with him.

So I want to be fair about Kurt before I tell the rest. He is not a lazy man. He is up before four every day from September to Thanksgiving, and his custom harvesting business is the real thing.

That spring he had bought a second combine. It was three years old and it cost more than my house. He had borrowed every dollar of it, and the note came due in payments that did not care whose father had died.

That was his reason. I understood it. I did not think much of it, but I understood it. A man scared of a bank will do things a man with a full grain bin never would.