The Last Corn Elwin Dried

Merritt Bauer leaned out of the scale house window while my semi sat on the scale, and he said it the way a man says something he thinks you already know.

“Sorry to hear about Arlette’s corn going out of condition, Wendy. That’s a hard thing, his last crop.”

I had my window down and the cold was coming straight in off the river bottom. It was the first week of March near Yankton, and I had a load of our own corn on, about a thousand bushels, the same as every load I haul.

“Who told you her corn went out?” I asked him. I kept my voice even. You learn to do that when you drive a grain truck and half the men at the elevator still call you “the Ostlund girl” at forty-eight.

Merritt frowned at me over his reading glasses. “Duane. He came in two weeks ago. Said the top crusted over in that cold snap in January and the whole bin smells musty. Said he was going to take it off her hands so she didn’t have to fool with it.”

I sat there with my foot on the brake and my hand on the gear shift. I could hear the leg running behind the scale house, that steady rattle of buckets carrying somebody else’s grain up to the top of the elevator.

“Did you tell him you’d buy it?” I asked.

“I told him if it was out of condition I could only take it as sample grade, at a heavy discount, and I’d rather not take it at all.”

Merritt shrugged. “We’ve got enough trouble keeping good corn good. I don’t buy anybody else’s problem in March.”

Behind me a man in a straight truck tapped his horn, polite, the way you do at an elevator when the line is long.

Merritt printed my ticket, handed it out the window, and told me to tell Arlette he was sorry. I said I would tell her something.

I want to explain the family before I go any further, because people always ask how a stepbrother gets to be so close to a widow’s grain.

My husband is Halvor Ostlund. He is fifty, a quiet man with a gray mustache who farms twelve hundred acres with me and does not waste words.

Halvor’s real father died when he was a baby. His mother, Arlette, married Elwin Ostlund when Halvor was two, and Elwin adopted him and gave him the name.

Elwin had a son from his first marriage, Duane, who grew up with his mother and her second husband in Sioux City.

Duane took his stepfather’s name, Kroll. He spent summers on the farm with Elwin until he was fourteen or so, and then he mostly stopped coming.

By the time he was grown, he farmed his own ground about thirty miles west, rented mostly, and he came around at Christmas and when he needed something.

That makes Duane Arlette’s stepson and Halvor’s stepbrother, if you are keeping track. There is not a drop of blood between Duane and Halvor or between Duane and Arlette.

But Elwin loved that boy, and so Arlette loved him too, the way a good woman does, on purpose.

Elwin died the week before Thanksgiving. He was seventy-seven. He had finished drying the last of his corn three weeks before, in the last days of October, in the old batch dryer beside the bin, running it on propane and checking it every two hours just like he had for forty years.