The Corn I Hauled for Verna

When I called him Saturday night, he picked up on the second ring. I told him what Kurt had said. There was a long silence on the line.

“Well,” Lyle said finally. “I finished my beans Thursday. My corn’s half out. I can run Verna’s first and finish mine after. But I can’t run a combine with no place to dump it, Eldon. I’ve got one cart and no truck to spare.”

“You’ll have a truck,” I said. “I’m taking the week.”

“You’re taking a week off your route? To haul your mother-in-law’s corn?”

“Somebody has to.”

He was quiet again. “I’ll be in that field at first light Monday,” he said. “You’ll need somebody on the cart. I’ll make a call.”

He did not say anything about Kurt. That was Lyle. In forty years I never heard him say a bad word about a man behind his back, and he was not going to start on a Saturday night on the telephone.

Sunday morning I called my dispatcher at home, which you do not do. He is a fair man and he has known me nineteen years. I told him it was family and harvest and I needed five days starting the next morning.

“Your mother-in-law,” he said. “Wendell’s widow?”

“Yes.”

“Take it,” he said. “I’ll cover your route with the new kid. Tell her we’re sorry about Wendell.”

Then Annelie and I went to church, and I sat in the pew and did not hear a word of the sermon. I was thinking about grain doors and tarp straps and whether the hoist on the old green truck would lift a full load after a year of sitting.

After church I went home and greased every fitting on that truck. I checked the tires, the brakes, the lights, the tarp, and the hoist. I ran it up and down four times in the yard while Annelie stood at the kitchen window with her coffee.

The hoist worked. The truck was ready. I went to bed at nine o’clock like a man who had to be somewhere.

Monday was a clear, cold morning with frost on the windshields. I wore my brown canvas vest over a red flannel shirt, and I was glad of both. I was at Verna’s lane by a quarter to seven, just as the sky behind the grove turned from gray to pale yellow.

Lyle’s combine was already sitting at the end of the field with the corn head on. I could see him in the cab with a thermos, waiting for the sun to come up enough to see the rows.

And behind the combine, hitched to an old tractor, sat a grain cart. On the tractor seat sat one of two brothers from our church, both of them past seventy and both of them retired from farming twelve years.

He climbed down when he saw me. He was a big man gone thin, in insulated coveralls and a stocking cap.

“Lyle called,” he said. “My brother’ll spell me at noon. Neither one of us has done a thing since we sold out but drive to the coffee shop and complain. This beats that.”

I shook his hand. I could not have said anything if I had tried.