The Corn I Hauled for Verna

At seven-fifteen Lyle started down the first rows. You could hear the corn head take the stalks, a steady chattering roar, and see the husks and cobs blow out the back in a long brown fan across the stubble.

When his hopper was full, the old man pulled the cart alongside, and Lyle swung the auger out and unloaded on the go. Then the cart came to the field edge where I was parked, and the old man unloaded into my truck.

I stood on the step of my truck and watched it fill. Wendell’s corn came pouring down out of that auger, yellow and clean and heavy, and the box filled up from the front to the back until it was heaped in a long golden ridge above the sideboards.

It was good corn. You could tell by the sound. Good dry corn sounds like rain on a tin roof when it hits the truck bed.

I tarped it, climbed in, and drove out the lane, nine miles into Fairbury to the elevator.

If you have never hauled to a country elevator at harvest, I will tell you what it is. It is a line of trucks and tractors and wagons a quarter mile long, and men sitting in their cabs, and a scale house, and dust.

You pull onto the scale. They probe your load to check the moisture and the test weight. You get a ticket. You pull to the pit, open the grain door at the back of the box, raise the hoist, and dump it through the grate. Then you pull back on the scale empty, and they weigh you again.

The difference is your load. That number goes on the ticket under the name on the account. Verna’s account at the elevator had said Brockhoff, Wendell for forty-six years.

The woman in the scale house that morning was Frieda. She has run the scale at our elevator for thirty years. She probed my load, looked at her screen, and then looked out the window at me.

“Eldon Raske,” she said through the speaker. “What are you doing hauling Brockhoff corn?”

“Verna’s corn,” I said. “Put it on Verna’s account.”

Frieda did not ask another question. She typed something and handed the ticket out the window. It said Brockhoff, Verna, in plain print. Wendell’s name was gone off the account. They had changed it over in August.

Under the name it said five hundred and fourteen bushels, at seventeen and a half percent moisture, test weight fifty-seven pounds. That is good corn in any year.

I dumped it, came back across the scale, and drove back out to the field. The round trip took me an hour and ten minutes with the line. By the time I got back, the cart was full and waiting.

We did six loads Monday. The last one I dumped at a quarter to five, with the sun going down low and orange behind the elevator legs. Lyle shut the combine down when I left the field, because there was no truck to dump into after that.

Six loads came to a little over three thousand bushels. We had taken about fifteen acres. If the weather held, we would be done in four days, maybe five.

I drove back to Verna’s at five-thirty. She had supper on the table for Lyle, the two brothers, and me. Pot roast and potatoes and green beans she had canned in August, and two pies.

She did not say anything about Kurt. Nobody did. She just set the food down, and she said grace in Wendell’s place, and we ate.