The Beet Truck in the Grove

Lorene came out at noon every day with dinner in a cardboard box.

She was seventy-two and had made noon dinner for a harvest crew every fall since she was a girl, and she said she was not about to stop just because her own family had moved to Fargo.

Hot dish, mostly. Tater tot hot dish on Monday, chicken and wild rice on Tuesday, a beef roast sliced thin on buns with the juice in a jar on Wednesday.

Bars in a separate pan, always, with a dish towel over them.

She set the box on the hood of her car at the field approach, and we ate standing up in the sun with the wind in our faces.

Lorene always bowed her head before she ate. She did not ask us to.

She just did it, quiet, a few words under her breath, and then she looked up and said, “Well, eat, it’s getting cold.”

Some days I bowed my head with her. Some days I was too tired to think of the words and she said them for both of us.

Ingrid rode with me both Saturdays. On the first one, she sat on the passenger side with a clipboard and a pencil and kept a count of loads and tons from the scale tickets, the way I had done for Grandpa when I was eight.

She was quiet at first. Ingrid is quiet when something has hurt her and she has not decided yet who to blame.

She had seen the tandem go past the school on Wednesday, hauling her father’s beets.

“Dad knows,” she said, somewhere around the twelfth load. “Doesn’t he?”

“He knows,” I said.

“Why doesn’t he do anything?”

“Your dad is behind with the bank,” I said. “When a man’s scared about money, sometimes he lets the person who isn’t scared drive. That’s not right. But it’s not because he doesn’t love you.”

Ingrid wrote down the ticket number. She did not say anything. But after a while she reached over and turned up the radio, which in that old truck only got the farm station out of Fargo and a polka hour, and she left it on the polka hour, which she has hated her whole life.

It was late on that first Saturday afternoon, with the sun low and gold over the field and the shadows of the beet piles long across the approach road, that Ingrid found it.

She had flipped down the passenger sun visor because the light was in her eyes. Something fell out of it into her lap.

It was a little stack of yellow paper folded in half, soft as cloth, held with a rubber band so old it broke when she touched it.

She unfolded it. It was a page from a tally pad, the kind the elevator used to give away, with the co-op’s name printed at the top.

On it, in my grandpa’s square pencil printing, were columns of numbers. Dates down the side. Loads across. Tons beside them.

At the top he had written: Beets, 1979.

I pulled over at the field approach. I shut the truck off, which I never did during a day of hauling, and I took the paper from her.

The loads were marked in fives, four straight lines and one across, the way you count in a card game. October 2 through October 19. On some days there were eleven or twelve loads.

Back then the piler was across the river and it took longer. At the bottom he had added it up and drawn a double line under it.