The Beet Truck in the Grove

Below the double line, in smaller letters, he had written: Finished Oct 19. Froze hard the 21st. Thank the Lord.

I was not born yet in 1979. My mother was a girl in high school.

But there it was, in his hand, on a piece of paper that had sat in that sun visor for forty-seven years, through his whole life and his death and all those winters in the grove.

“He beat the freeze by two days,” Ingrid said, reading it over my arm. “Mom. He beat it by two days, same as we’re trying to.”

I sat in the cab and cried. I am not ashamed to tell it. Ingrid did not say anything.

She just took the pencil out of her clipboard and slid over close to me on the bench seat, and when I had stopped, she turned the paper over to the back, which was blank, and wrote at the top in her own neat printing: Beets.

Then she wrote the year under it. Then she copied out every load we had hauled that week from her clipboard, in fives, four lines and one across, just like his.

At the bottom, smaller, she left a space. “For when we finish,” she said.

She folded it back up and put it back in the visor, and flipped the visor up, and looked out the windshield at the field.

“Okay,” she said. “Arvid’s waiting.”

Our pastor stopped at the field approach one afternoon on his way back from a hospital visit. He did not preach.

He ate a lemon bar by Lorene’s car, and before he left he said, “We’ve got you on the prayer list, Kirsten,” and drove off.

I don’t know who put me on it. I have a pretty good idea it was Lorene.

On the ninth day of hauling, the long-range turned into a short-range.

The weather service had the low dropping to twenty-two two nights out, and twenty the night after that. The beets in the ground had maybe forty-eight hours.

We had twenty-four acres left. Arvid did the arithmetic on the hood of Lorene’s car with a carpenter’s pencil.

Twenty-four acres at thirty tons was seven hundred and twenty tons, and at nine and a half a load that was seventy-six loads. At forty-some a day, that was two days if nothing broke.

“Nothing better break,” Arvid said.

Nothing did. On the tenth day I hauled forty-three loads, and the old Ford ran like it had something to prove.

I had come to think of it as a living thing by then. I talked to it on the hills. I patted the dash when it pulled out of the field heavy.

On the morning of the eleventh day, with the frost thick and white on every beet top and the sun coming up red behind the elevator, we had nine acres left. The last strip, along the west side, next to the shelterbelt.

Ingrid came with me that day. It was a Saturday again. The second one.

I brought the first load of the day into the piling ground at about a quarter to eight. The sun was barely clear of the horizon.

Everything was white with frost and gold where the light hit it, and my breath fogged inside the cab.

The line was long that morning, because everybody in the valley had seen the same forecast. Fifteen trucks, maybe more, idling on the approach road with their exhaust going straight up in the cold.