The Beet Truck in the Grove

Odell came down the line like he had every morning for eleven days, and waved me forward, and I pulled out and went past.

I was on the scale, waiting for the probe to come down, when I looked in my side mirror and saw a tandem pull into the line behind me.

A newer one, a Kenworth, the paint still bright and the box still clean. The tandem Brent and I had bought together in 2018, the tandem the decree had given me.

Shayla was driving it. She had Brent’s beets in it, heaped. Brent’s beets had been coming to this same piler all along, eight miles each way from his fields, with a hired kid driving.

The kid had quit on Friday. I do not know if she knew she would see me there. I think she must have hoped she wouldn’t.

The probe came down and took its bite and went back up. The light turned green.

I pulled ahead onto the piler, and backed up to the hopper, and raised the box, and watched the beets go down.

When I came back over the scale to weigh out, Shayla was next on it, and the tandem was sitting at the edge of the scale waiting, and Odell had tucked his clipboard under his arm and was walking over to her door.

Half the drivers in that line had climbed down to stretch, the way men do in a long wait, and could hear everything.

I stopped the Ford beside the scale house to pick up my ticket. Odell looked up at Shayla in the cab of the tandem. He did not raise his voice.

Odell has never raised his voice in his life. But the piler had just stopped for a minute to let them clear a jam, and in that quiet, everybody heard him.

“Morning, Mrs. Halvorson,” he said to Shayla. “You’ll want to know something before you dump that load.”

Shayla looked down at him, then at me. Her face did not do much. “What’s that,” she said.

“That old single-axle there,” he said, and he pointed at Grandpa’s truck with the clipboard, “has hauled more clean beets across this scale in the last eleven days than this tandem has. Nine and a half tons at a time. Less dirt in every load than any truck on this site.”

He let that sit. The man in the red semi, two trucks back, set his coffee cup down on his dash.

“I’ve run this piler thirty-one years,” Odell said. “Her grandpa hauled beets to me in that truck. Now she’s hauling them in it, because somebody took the truck that’s hers off her field on the second day.”

He did not say who. He did not need to. “That’s all I wanted to say. Go ahead and pull up, ma’am.”

Shayla did not say anything. She looked straight ahead out the windshield of the tandem for what felt like a long time.

Then she put it in gear and pulled up onto the scale, and the probe came down, and her face was pale as the frost.

I took my ticket from the window. The woman in the scale house had put a butterscotch candy on top of it.

I did not say anything to Shayla at the piler. I had thought, all eleven days, about what I would say if I saw her, and I had a hundred things ready, and every one of them was sharp enough to cut, and when the moment came I did not want any of them.