The Beet Truck in the Grove

But I had been divorced long enough to know how it goes. A deputy would drive out. He would read the decree. He would call Brent.

Brent would say it was a misunderstanding about the note. The deputy would say it was a civil matter and I ought to talk to my attorney.

The sheriff would have taken a week to read a divorce decree, and my beets did not have a week.

The long-range forecast had a hard freeze coming in the third week of October, and in the valley everybody knows what that means.

A sugar beet can take a light frost in the ground. The leaves die back and the crown is tough.

But a hard freeze, down in the low twenties for a night or two, freezes the crown, and a frozen beet that thaws starts to rot.

The sugar company will not pile a load of soft, frozen beets, and they are right not to.

I had a hundred and forty acres in the ground. The year looked like thirty tons an acre if the weather held.

At about forty-three dollars a ton, that was a hundred and eighty thousand dollars sitting under the dirt.

Out of that came the seed, the fertilizer, the spraying, the land payment, Arvid’s wages, and the money I had set aside for Ingrid’s first year at the college in Crookston.

Ingrid was seventeen. She was a senior. That beet check was her tuition.

So I did not call the sheriff. I called Brent.

Brent was on his own harvester across the township. He picked up on the second try.

“Kirsten,” he said, and I could hear the harvester under him and the radio.

“Your wife just drove off with my truck,” I said. “Off my field. On the second day.”

There was a long space. I could hear the lifter wheels chattering. Brent and I were married nineteen years, and I know what his silences mean.

That one meant he had known she was going to do it and had hoped she would not.

“She handles the trucks,” he said finally. “Talk to her.”

“I did talk to her.”

“Then I don’t know what to tell you, Kirst. We’re in a spot with the bank.”

He said my name the old way, the short way, and then he seemed to hear himself say it and he cleared his throat. “I’ll see what I can do.”

He did not see what he could do. Not that day and not for a while. I want to be fair to Brent, because he is Ingrid’s father and he is not a bad man.

He is a man who hates a fight more than he hates being wrong, and that is a different thing, but it costs the people around him just the same.

I hung up. Arvid looked at me. “Who’s got a truck?” he said.

Nobody had a truck. Not in the first week of the beet campaign in the valley.

Every truck from Grand Forks to Ada was hauling, and every driver with a commercial license was already hired by somebody with more acres than me.

I called four people that afternoon and got the same answer four times, kindly.

Then I was standing in the yard at half past three, with the sun already leaning toward the shelterbelt, looking at the grove, and I remembered what was in it.

My grandpa bought a new Ford F-700 in the spring of 1974. Single axle, fourteen-foot box, a hoist, and the gas V8 he always called the three-ninety.