The Winter We Picked Our Own Heat

The wagon

Grandpa had built the bin in the stove shed low on purpose, three feet high, so a wagon chute could spout right into it.

Rudy pulled the slide on the gravity wagon and the corn came down the chute in a gold rush that sounded like rain on a tin roof.

It filled the bin. It filled it and heaped over the top, and Rudy and Asa scooped the rest into the old feed barrels along the wall, and when that was full too, we set the extra in bags against the back of the shed.

Maisy stood in the doorway with her hands over her mouth. She had her peg on.

She had not taken it off since that first Monday except to sleep, and some nights I am not sure she took it off then.

“Is it ours now?” she said. “For real?”

“It was always ours,” Rudy told her. “I just had it for a while.”

I tried to give him the money. I had my checkbook in the truck.

I tried to give him what he had paid Vernon, at least, and he put his hand flat on top of my checkbook and pushed it closed.

“I’m not getting paid twice for the same corn,” he said. “And I’m not the one owes you.”

The stop sign

When the wagon was empty, Rudy climbed back on the tractor and pulled out of our lane. He did not head home.

He drove the hundred yards up to the corner and stopped the tractor right beside Vernon’s pickup, which was still sitting at the stop sign with the engine running.

I did not hear what was said. I was too far away and I would not have gone closer if I could.

I saw Rudy lean down from the tractor seat. I saw Vernon’s window come all the way down.

It took maybe two minutes. Rudy did most of the talking, which for Rudy was something to see.

Vernon sat with both hands on the wheel. At the end, Rudy straightened up and put the tractor in gear and drove home.

Vernon’s pickup sat there another full minute after he left. Then it pulled out onto the blacktop, not toward town, but back toward his own place.

I found out later, the way you find out everything in a small place, that Rudy had told Vernon he would have his eleven hundred and twenty dollars back by Monday or Rudy would explain to every man at the elevator why he wanted it.

Vernon paid him Monday morning. In cash. Rudy told the men at the elevator anyway, not to be mean, but because one of them asked him straight out why Vernon was at his house at seven in the morning counting out bills on the hood of a truck.

By Wednesday everybody on our road knew why. Not from me. I never said a word about it to anyone except Rudy, and only because Asa beat me to it.