The Corn I Hauled for Verna

Frieda probed the load. She handed the ticket out. And when I looked in my side mirror, I saw that Kurt had gotten out of his pickup and was walking up the line toward the scale house.

He came right up to my door. I rolled the window down. He did not say anything at first. He was looking at the dashboard, where I had been stacking the scale tickets all week under a clip.

There were twenty-three of them, counting the one in my hand. Every one said Brockhoff, Verna at the top.

“How much?” Kurt said finally.

“Twelve thousand, give or take. Maybe five loads left.”

He stood there. The wind was moving the dust around his boots. Frieda, in the scale house, had turned around in her chair and was watching through the glass. So were the two men at the probe.

“Who’s running the combine?”

“Lyle.”

“Who’s on the cart?”

“The two brothers from church. Lyle’s cousin’s got a wagon. Annelie took off work. Your mom’s been cooking dinner for six people every day.”

Kurt’s face did something I had never seen it do. He was fifteen when his father first put him behind the wheel of a grain truck, and he was forty-nine now, and in all the years I had known him I had never seen him without an answer.

He did not have one now. He looked at the tickets, and he looked up at the elevator, and he looked back along the line of trucks behind him, at all those men sitting in their cabs, who knew whose corn it was and whose it was not.

“I’ve got a note on that combine,” he said. “I didn’t tell her the half of it.”

“I know you do,” I said.

“If I miss two payments, they take it.”

“I know.”

He put his hand on my door, flat, and stood with his head down. I could see the muscle working in his jaw.

“You could have called me,” he said. “Before you did all this.”

“I could have,” I said. “And we’d have fought, and the corn would still be in the field. It’s coming down Friday night, Kurt. You know it is.”

He did not argue. He knew it as well as I did. He had been looking at the same forecast all week.

Somebody behind us honked, once, short. Not mean. Just a man who had his own corn to dump.

Kurt took his hand off my door. “What time are you finishing?”

“Lyle says Friday afternoon, if nothing breaks.”

He nodded. He walked back to his pickup without another word, and I drove to the pit and dumped Wendell’s corn.

Friday morning came up clear and cold. There was frost again, heavier this time, and you could see the gray front building low in the northwest, still far off, but there.

We started at first light. A feeder chain had broken on the combine Thursday afternoon, and Lyle had worked on it until dark, and he started it up at a quarter to seven like it was new.

I made two loads before ten. When I came back from the second one, there was a pickup sitting at the end of Verna’s lane.

It was Kurt’s. He was not in it. He was standing in the field beside Lyle’s combine, which had stopped, and the two of them were talking. I could not hear what they said. I sat in my truck and waited.