The Corn I Hauled for Verna

By Tuesday, people in town knew.

I do not know exactly how. Small towns do not need a telephone for news. Somebody saw my green truck going in and out of the Brockhoff lane. Somebody saw Lyle’s combine in Verna’s field instead of his own. Somebody stood in the scale house and saw the name on the tickets.

On my second load Tuesday morning, the line at the elevator ran back almost to the highway. I took my place at the end. I had a thermos of coffee and the radio on, and I figured on forty minutes.

One of the elevator men, a young fellow in a hooded sweatshirt directing traffic, came walking down the line. He stopped at my window and motioned for me to roll it down.

“You’re the Brockhoff load?”

“I’m hauling for Verna Brockhoff.”

“Pull around,” he said. “Go straight to the scale. Boss says.”

I looked at the line of trucks ahead of me. “I don’t want to cut anybody, son.”

“You’re not cutting,” he said. “We already asked them.” And he nodded up the line, and I saw two or three of the farmers ahead of me lift a hand off their steering wheels.

So I pulled around. I went to the scale and to the pit and dumped Wendell’s corn and came back, and nobody in that line said one word to me except one old man who leaned out his window as I passed and said, “Tell Verna we’re thinking about her.”

That happened every load the rest of the week. I would pull to the end of the line, and somebody in a hooded sweatshirt would walk back and wave me through. I never asked for it once.

Tuesday we did seven loads, and Wednesday seven more. The weather held, cold and bright, the corn drying down a little in the field every day.

The second brother came out at noon and took over the grain cart. He was smaller than his brother, with a white beard, and he brought sandwiches from his wife wrapped in waxed paper and a jug of iced tea.

“Mother wanted you to have these,” he said. He had been calling his wife Mother for fifty years, I learned, and she had been calling him Dad.

Wednesday morning Annelie took a vacation day from the hospital in Pontiac, where she works the front desk in admitting. She drove out to her mother’s place at seven o’clock and stayed all day.

She did not ride in the truck. She stayed in the kitchen with Verna and cooked. She made dinner at noon for six people, because by Wednesday there were six of us. One of Lyle’s cousins had come by with a second tractor and gravity wagon to give the cart a place to dump while I was gone to town.

At noon Annelie and Verna drove the meal out to the field in Verna’s car. They spread it out on the tailgate of Lyle’s pickup at the end of the field, beef sandwiches and potato salad and coffee in Wendell’s old thermos.

Lyle shut the combine down for twenty minutes. We stood around the tailgate in the sun and ate. Nobody said much. The corn stood golden in the rows beside us, half of it still standing, half of it gone.