The Corn I Hauled for Verna

After dinner Lyle went back to work. Verna stood at the end of the gravel field road in her blue quilted jacket, her silver curls lifting in the breeze, watching the combine unload into the grain cart in the bright afternoon. I went and stood by her.

“Wendell would be embarrassed,” she said. “All these people working for free.”

“Wendell helped every one of these people at some time,” I said. “Lyle told me Wendell pulled his combine out of a mudhole in 1993 with the old tractor and never let him buy him a cup of coffee for it.”

She smiled at that. It was the first time I had seen her smile since July.

“He would have done it for anybody,” she said.

“I know,” I said. “That’s why they’re here.”

Wednesday night after supper, Annelie’s phone rang. It was Kurt.

She took it out on the back porch. I could hear her through the window, though I tried not to. Her voice was low and even, the way she talks to patients’ families in the admitting office.

“I know you’re busy,” she said. “Nobody’s asking you for anything, Kurt.”

A pause.

“No, he’s not trying to make you look bad. He’s hauling Mom’s corn. That’s all he’s doing.”

A longer pause.

“Then come out and see it,” she said. “She’d like that.”

She came back in and sat down across from me and laid the phone on the table.

“He’s heard,” she said. “Somebody at the elevator in Pontiac told him the whole county’s talking. He thinks you’re doing it to shame him.”

I thought about that. I was honest with myself. I have known men who would do a thing like this just to make another man look small, and I did not want to be one of them.

“I’m not,” I said. “If Kurt pulled into that field tomorrow with his own truck, I’d go back to work Thursday and never say a word.”

“I know you would,” Annelie said. “That’s what I told him.” She looked at the phone. “He said he can’t. He said he’s got a farmer near Dwight waiting on him with six hundred acres and the bank on the phone twice this week.”

“Then he’s got his reasons,” I said. “And we’ve got the corn.”

Thursday was the fourth day. We had about four thousand bushels left in the field, maybe eight loads. Lyle thought we would finish Friday afternoon if nothing broke.

The forecast had turned. The radio said a front was coming down out of the Dakotas, with wind Friday night and the first snow Saturday. You could feel it already in the air Thursday morning, a dampness under the cold.

I made my third load of the day at about one o’clock in the afternoon. I pulled into the elevator line, and as usual, a young man in a hooded sweatshirt came walking back to wave me through.

But before I could pull out, a pickup pulled in right behind me. I knew the truck. I knew the man in it.

It was Kurt. He must have come into town for parts, and he had pulled in behind the line to cut through the lot, and he was sitting there right behind my green truck.

The young man waved me through. I looked in my mirror. Kurt was watching.

I did not want to cut in front of my wife’s brother. I sat a minute. Then I put it in gear and pulled around to the scale, because that is what they had told me to do all week, and because Wendell’s corn was in the back of my truck and it belonged on that scale.