The Corn I Hauled for Verna

After a while Lyle climbed back into the cab, and Kurt walked over to the old tractor and the grain cart, where the older of the two brothers was sitting.

The old man looked down at him a long time. Then he climbed off the seat, slow, and Kurt climbed on. The old man walked over to where I was parked, and he stood beside my truck with his hands in his coveralls pockets.

“Says he’ll run the cart the rest of the day,” the old man said. “Didn’t say anything else. Didn’t need to.”

So that last morning, Kurt Brockhoff ran the grain cart for his mother’s corn. He did it well. He had done it a hundred times for his father. He pulled up under the combine auger without Lyle having to slow down once.

He never came to my truck to talk. He just unloaded into it, load after load, and I drove them to town.

At noon we stopped to eat. Kurt ate standing up by his pickup, by himself. Verna watched him from the end of the gravel road, but she did not go over. She let him eat. I think she knew he needed to.

By two o’clock Friday afternoon, there was one strip left in the field, about eight rows wide along the fence.

The wind had started to pick up a little. You could hear it in the dry corn leaves, a long whispering sound across the whole field.

Lyle took the last rows at about half past two. Kurt brought the cart over. And when the last of Wendell’s corn came pouring off that auger into the back of my green truck, everybody who had been in that field all week was standing at the edge of it, watching.

Verna came walking down the gravel field road in her blue quilted jacket. She had something in her hand. When she got close I saw it was Wendell’s seed cap, the green one with the frayed bill.

“Eldon,” she said. “I’d like to ride along on this one, if you’ll have me.”

I got down off the step and helped her up into the cab. It is a high step on that old truck. She was light as a girl, and her hand on my arm was cold.

She sat in the jump seat with Wendell’s cap in her lap and her hands folded over it. I tarped the load and climbed in beside her.

Out the window, I saw Kurt standing by the grain cart, watching us. He lifted his hand, just a little. His mother lifted hers back.

We drove out the lane slow. The truck was heavy and the gravel was loose. Verna looked at the field, the stubble stretching out flat and brown all the way to the grove, where there had been corn standing that morning.

“He planted it the last week of April,” she said. “He said it was the best seedbed he’d ever had. We didn’t know.”

“No,” I said. “Nobody ever does.”

We turned onto the blacktop toward Fairbury. She did not talk for a few miles. The radio was off. The corn in the truck behind us made a low sound when we went over the rough spots, like sand shifting.