The Beet Truck in the Grove

Then he looked at me. “The title’s on the seat,” he said.

“It’s free and clear. I made the last payment like the judge said, and I should have brought it over in August, and I didn’t. That was on me. And what happened in the field, that was on me too. Shayla did it, but I let her.”

“You did,” I said.

“I know.” He rubbed the back of his neck. “Odell called me last night. I’ve known Odell since I was twenty. He’s never once called me at home.”

He let out a breath. “He didn’t say much. He didn’t have to.”

Then he told me how things stood with the bank, the first straight thing he had told me in three years. They were behind more than I had known.

Two bad years on the wheat and the price of everything up. Shayla had found it in the books in August and panicked.

“She’s not a bad person, Kirsten,” he said. “She was scared.”

“I know she was scared,” I said. “So was I. I had a hundred and forty acres in the ground and our daughter’s college in them.”

Ingrid went down the steps and hugged him. He held onto her a long time.

When she let go, he told her the beets had all made it into the pile on his side too, just ahead of the freeze, because Odell had put a second piler on and kept it running late.

I thought, but did not say, that Odell had done that for Brent’s beets with Shayla driving, after everything. That is the kind of man Odell is.

Brent looked across the yard at the old Ford, parked by the granary now with its box still down and dirt from the last load still in the corners.

“Your grandpa’s truck,” he said.

“Yes.”

“I always wanted to scrap it.”

“I know,” I said. “You were wrong.”

He nodded slowly. “I was wrong about a lot of things,” he said.

Then he walked down the drive to where Shayla was waiting at the end of it in his pickup, and got in, and they drove off.

She did not look at the house. But she did not look away either.

With the first beet check I paid Arvid double what I had promised him. He tried to give half of it back. Lorene would not let him.

Ingrid started at the college in Crookston the next fall. She lives at home and drives in. On Saturdays in October, she still rides along.

The tandem hauls most of the beets now. It is faster and safer, and I hope I never haul a whole harvest in a single-axle again.

But I kept Grandpa’s Ford. Arvid and I put new brake lines on it that winter, and a new left headlight, and Ingrid painted the hood with a can of green that almost matches. It lives in the shop now, not the grove.

The tally is still in the passenger visor. Grandpa’s loads on one side, ours on the other. There is room at the bottom for a few more years.

And every October, on the first morning of the campaign, before the tandem goes out, I drive the old Ford to the field and Arvid, or whoever is running the harvester that year, fills it with the first nine and a half tons.

I drive it down the gravel to the piler, and Odell waves me around the line, and the first load of every harvest goes in the way it always did.