The Beet Truck in the Grove

That meant more than twice the loads, with one driver, and a harvester sitting still every time I was gone.

What saved me was the distance. The piling ground was a mile and a half down the gravel from the field approach.

Grandpa had picked that quarter for beets because of it. Four minutes out loaded, three back empty, and the rest of each trip was scale, hopper and waiting, if the line was short.

Arvid filled me the first time at a quarter past eleven on the third day of the campaign.

I sat in the cab and watched the boom swing over and the beets come pouring down the chain, thumping on the floor of the box, dirt sifting off them in little brown clouds. The springs settled. The truck sank down on its new tires.

“That’s enough,” Arvid called, holding up his hand. “That’s all she wants.”

I eased out the clutch in low and the old truck walked off the field like it had been waiting seventeen years for someone to ask.

The piling ground in October looks like a mountain range somebody built overnight.

Long, straight piles of beets, twenty feet high and longer than a city block, with the yellow pilers standing at the ends of them like big tired animals. Trucks lined up on the approach road in a row.

I got in line behind a red semi from out by Euclid and a white tandem I didn’t know. There were eight trucks ahead of me. I figured on twenty minutes.

I had been sitting there maybe two minutes when I saw a man in a hooded sweatshirt and a hard hat walking down the line toward me.

He walked like a man whose knees had been on concrete for forty years. When he got close, I saw it was Odell Brekke.

Odell ran the piler at that site. He had run it for thirty-one campaigns.

He was sixty-one, and when I was a little girl riding with Grandpa, Odell had been the young man on the piler crew who gave me butterscotch candy out of his shirt pocket.

“That’s your grandpa’s Ford,” he said. “I’d know that grille anywhere. Where’s your tandem, Kirsten?”

I told him. I did not decorate it. I just said Shayla had driven it off the field on the second day and parked it in Brent’s shop, and I had pulled this out of the grove.

Odell did not say anything about Shayla. He stepped out onto the approach, raised his arm and waved me forward, around the whole line, up to the scale.

“Odell, I can wait,” I said.

“No, you can’t,” he said. “Your grandpa never made a man wait in his life. Pull up.”

I drove past the eight trucks with my face hot. Not one of those drivers honked.

The man in the red semi lifted two fingers off his steering wheel as I went by, the way men do on a gravel road.

For anyone who has not hauled beets, it works the same as when Grandpa did it. You pull onto the scale loaded and stop.

Then a probe on a long arm comes down out of a tower and bites a sample out of your load, about thirty pounds of beets, and that sample goes into a bag with your number on it.

That bag goes to the tare lab. They wash the beets and weigh them, and that tells the company how much of your load was dirt, rocks and tops, and they test it for sugar.