The Corn I Hauled for Verna

“Kurt was always the one who hauled,” she said. “Since he was fifteen. Wendell would sit on the combine and Kurt would drive the truck, and I’d bring dinner out on the tailgate. Every fall. Thirty-four years.”

“I know,” I said.

“I don’t blame him for the combine,” she said. “His father would have told him not to buy it, and he’d have bought it anyway, and they’d have fought. That’s how they were.”

She looked down at Wendell’s cap in her lap.

“But I blame him for walking out of my kitchen,” she said quietly. “I’ll forgive him for it. But I blame him.”

I did not say anything. There was nothing a son-in-law could add to that.

When we pulled into the elevator, there was no line. It was Friday afternoon, the wind coming up, and most of the men had finished early and gone home ahead of the weather.

But there were people there. Frieda had come out of the scale house and was standing on the platform in her jacket. The two men from the probe were there. The manager was there, a heavy man in a feed cap, and the young fellows in hooded sweatshirts.

They were standing in a row by the scale, and when I pulled on, the manager walked over to Verna’s side of the truck and took off his cap.

Verna rolled her window down. He reached up and shook her hand.

“Mrs. Brockhoff,” he said. “Wendell hauled to this elevator for forty-six years. This is the best corn anybody brought in this week.”

Verna held onto his hand. She did not say anything. She just nodded.

Frieda probed the load. She handed the last ticket up through my window. Then she leaned around and looked at Verna.

“Do you want this one, honey?”

Verna took the ticket. She held it in her hand and looked at it a long time. Brockhoff, Verna. Four hundred and ninety-eight bushels. Sixteen percent moisture. The corn had dried down in the field all week while we hauled it.

“Fourteen thousand two hundred and eighty-six,” Frieda said. “Total for the week. On your account.”

I drove to the pit and opened the grain door and raised the hoist. Verna sat in the cab beside me and listened to the last of Wendell’s corn go through the grate, a long rushing pour, and then the sound of the empty box knocking down.

She was crying then. Not hard. Just quietly, the way women her age cry, with her hand flat on Wendell’s cap.

“Thank you, Eldon,” she said. “He’d have been proud of you.”

I could not answer her. I lowered the hoist, closed the grain door, and drove us home.

The wind came that night, and the snow came Saturday, three inches of wet heavy snow. I stood at our kitchen window Saturday morning with my coffee and looked at the fields around Fairbury.

There was standing corn on half the farms between our house and the highway. A lot of it was down by Sunday, flat in the snow.

Lyle’s own corn was among it. He had sixty acres left standing that he had not gotten to because he had run Verna’s first. The wind and the snow put better than a thousand bushels of it on the ground before he could get back in the field the next week.

I offered to pay him for it. I offered more than once. He would not hear of it.

“Wendell would have done the same for me,” he said. “Wendell did do the same for me. In 1993.”