The Old Picker That Beat the Storm

The scale house

The storm came through Monday night. It rained four inches by morning. Tuesday dawned gray and soft, with light rain coming and going in bands.

I took the last trailer to the buying point myself, because I wanted to see it through.

The buying point outside Dawson sits right on the highway.

There is a scale, a row of dryer fans, a grading room, and the little scale house where Ardith Coker has sat behind the counter for twenty years, weighing trailers and handing out grade sheets.

That morning the lot was full. Half the county was there trying to get their last loads in before the next band came through.

There were trucks lined up along the highway shoulder. The drivers waited inside the scale house, out of the drizzle, drinking coffee and talking weather.

I pulled onto the scale. The inspector came out with the probe and pulled the sample, the way they do, and took it into the grading room.

I parked and walked into the scale house and stood against the wall with everybody else.

Ardith is 61. She wears reading glasses on a chain around her neck and she has known me since I was a girl riding in Daddy’s truck.

She looked up when I came in and gave me a little nod.

I had my back to the door when it opened. I knew who it was before I turned around, because the room went quiet.

Lamar

Lamar Pickett came in with his hat in his hand and his grade tickets in the other. He had gotten most of his own crop in.

Not all of it. I found out later he had about forty acres still in the windrows when the rain hit.

He saw the drivers along the wall. Then he saw me. He stopped just inside the door like he had walked into the wrong building.

Nobody said anything. Wilburn was there, leaning on the wall by the coffee pot. He did not look at Lamar. He looked at the floor.

Ardith came back from the grading room with my sheet in her hand. She put on her reading glasses and looked at it a while.

Then she laid it face up on the counter where everybody could see it, and she looked up at the room.

“Lorna Pickett,” she said, loud enough for the whole room. “Seventy-six total sound mature kernels. Two percent damage. Segregation one.”

It was a good grade. It was as good a grade as we had ever had.

Then Ardith took off her glasses and let them hang on the chain.

“I want everybody in here to know something,” she said. “Those peanuts were picked with a 1985 two-row machine. By a family that already paid somebody else to pick them and got nothing for their money.”

She did not look at Lamar. She did not need to.

“One hundred eighty acres. Four days. Every last one of them is in, and they graded better than most of what’s come across that scale this week.”

The scale house was so quiet I could hear the rain on the tin roof.