The Beet Truck in the Grove

Shayla had the tandem’s engine running before I could get my sandwich back in the wax paper.

I was sitting on the tailgate of my pickup at the field approach, eating the noon dinner Lorene had sent out, and I watched my own beet truck pull off the edge of my own field.

It was the second day of the harvest campaign. We had hauled only a handful of loads, because the harvester’s elevator chain broke the first morning and Arvid spent most of that day fixing it.

The sky was that hard, clean blue you only get in the Red River Valley in early October, and the black dirt behind the harvester was still steaming a little where the sun hit it.

I set the sandwich down and walked out onto the gravel. I did not run. Arvid had shut down the harvester and was watching from the cab.

Shayla stopped the truck when I stood in front of the grille.

She rolled the window down about four inches, the way you do at a drive-up window when you are not sure of the person on the other side.

“Brent made the last payment on this truck in August,” she said. “I have the bank letter in my purse. It’s his truck, Kirsten. I’m just taking it where it belongs.”

She was thirty-six, eleven years younger than Brent and eight years younger than me.

She wore a clean quilted vest and her hair was done, and she had run the books for Brent’s operation since the spring they got married at the courthouse in Crookston.

“The decree gave me this truck,” I said. “And the ground it sits on. Brent paid the note because the judge told him to pay the note. That was his half of the deal, not a way to buy it back.”

“We’re behind on the operating note,” she said, and for one second her voice went thin.

“The bank wants a payment out of the first beet check. Brent’s got two hundred and ten acres sitting in the ground across the township and one truck. You can have it back when his are in.”

“Mine are in the ground too,” I said. “Today. Right there.”

She looked past me at the field. Arvid’s harvester sat with six rows of beets half lifted, the defoliated tops lying in strips like cut hay, the crowns showing white and purple in the dirt.

Then she looked back at me and put the truck in gear.

“Then I guess you’d better find another truck,” she said, and I stepped aside because I was not going to stand in front of twenty tons of steel to prove a point.

She pulled onto the county road and turned east toward Brent’s place, and the dust drifted back over the ditch grass.

Arvid climbed down off the harvester. He was seventy-four, had farmed the quarter north of us for fifty years, and had come back to run my harvester because, he said, a man could only fix so many screen doors.

He took his cap off, looked at the road, and put the cap back on. “Well,” he said. “That’s a new one.”

Arvid was not a man to waste words on a thing that was already done.

He walked over to the tailgate, picked up my sandwich, handed it to me, and sat down beside me while I finished it, because Lorene would ask.

People have asked me since why I didn’t just call the sheriff. I thought about it, sitting on that tailgate. I had his number in my phone. His deputy had gone to school with my cousin.