The Beet Truck in the Grove

You get paid on clean beets and the sugar in them, not on the dirt you hauled in.

Then you drive up onto the piler and back the truck up to the hopper. You raise the box.

The beets go down into the hopper and over the grab rolls, which spin and knock the dirt off, and the clean beets ride up the long boom and onto the pile.

The dirt they knock off comes down a separate chute, right back into your truck box, because it is your dirt and it goes back on your field.

Then you drive back over the scale and weigh out with your dirt, and they figure what you delivered.

The first load the old Ford ever hauled for me came out to nine tons four hundred pounds of beets, and the dirt that came back would not have filled a five-gallon pail. Odell looked at my ticket and smiled.

“Arvid’s running slow,” he said. “Lets the cleaning chain work. Your grandpa did the same thing.”

I remember the eleven days that came after as one long day, cold in the mornings, bright by noon, blue at the edges by six.

The pilers run all night under lights when the weather is right. But I was one woman in a fifty-two-year-old truck with bad lights, and I made a rule that first day, and I kept it.

I hauled from first light until dusk, and when the sun touched the shelterbelt on the west side of the section, I parked.

In October in northern Minnesota, that gave me a little over eleven hours.

The sun came up behind the elevator in town at about half past seven. It went down at a quarter to seven. In between, I hauled.

Arvid started the defoliator at first light to take the tops off the rows we would lift that day, and by the time I had the truck warmed up and the frost off the windshield, he was on the harvester.

Lorene drove him out a little after seven every morning in their white car and handed him his lunch pail through the window.

I hauled thirty-eight loads the first full day. I hauled forty-one the second.

On the fourth day, when I finally learned to time the boom so I was rolling back into the field just as Arvid’s tank came full, I hauled forty-four, and Arvid said that was the most he’d seen a single-axle do since the seventies.

Every load, Odell or one of his crew waved me past the line. I never once asked.

After the second day I stopped saying I could wait, because it made Odell cross. Not one driver in that line ever complained to me.

My body learned that truck the way it learns a new pair of boots.

The Ford had a five-speed and a two-speed rear end, so ten gears if you used them all, and you had to double-clutch going down or it would grind.

By the third day my left knee ached all night. By the fifth, it didn’t.

The steering was heavy, with no power to it. I wore leather gloves because the wheel was cracked and it bit into my palms.

I wore my gray ball cap with my hair down my back, and my grandpa’s red and black buffalo plaid jacket, which had hung on a nail in the granary for seventeen years, because it was warmer than mine and because I wanted to.