The Last Corn Elwin Dried

He brought it down to fifteen percent and augered it into the bin himself, nine thousand bushels, a full bin, filled right up into the peak.

Then he leveled it, ran the fan to cool it, and wrote the hours in his notebook.

He died in his chair after dinner on a Sunday. Arlette found him with the farm paper open on his lap to the markets.

She told me later she sat with him a long while before she called anybody, and that she was not sorry she did.

So that bin was the last thing Elwin Ostlund ever filled. Arlette knew it. Halvor knew it. And Duane knew it too, because he stood in the second row at the funeral and shook every hand in the church basement like he was the one who had lost the most.

I drove home from the elevator that day slower than I needed to. I parked the semi in the yard and walked into the shop, where Halvor was greasing the planter.

I told him what Merritt said, word for word, and I watched his jaw get tight.

“That corn is fine,” he said. “I was up on that bin a week ago.”

“I know it’s fine,” I said. “I’m telling you what Duane told the buyer. And I would bet you a hundred dollars he has told your mother something too.”

Halvor set the grease gun down on the bench. He did not say anything for a while. Then he wiped his hands on a rag, a long time, finger by finger, and he said we would go see his mother after church on Sunday, because she would want to tell it at her own table.

Arlette lives a mile and a half from us, on the home place, in the white house Elwin’s father built.

She is seventy-four, small and straight, and she still makes her own bread. After church that Sunday she had a roast in, and she waited until the pie to say it.

“Duane came by,” she said, cutting the pie into exact pieces the way she always does. “He’s going to take the corn. He says it went out in that cold spell, and Merritt Bauer told him flat out he won’t touch it.”

“Did he make you an offer, Mom?” Halvor asked her.

“Two dollars and ten cents a bushel,” Arlette said. “He says that’s more than he’ll get for it, out of condition, and he’s doing it so I don’t have to fool with a bad bin. He said Elwin would want it handled inside the family.”

I did the arithmetic without meaning to. Nine thousand bushels at two dollars and ten cents is about eighteen thousand nine hundred dollars.

The cash bid at the elevator that week was over four dollars. If that corn was sound, Duane was going to clear close to eighteen thousand dollars on his father’s last crop.

“Have you signed anything?” I asked her.

“He brought a paper,” Arlette said. “I told him I’d sign it Wednesday. I wanted to pray on it first, and I wanted to think about Elwin a little, and I didn’t want to do it on the Lord’s day.”

Halvor put his fork down. He is not a man who reaches for his mother’s hand, but he did then.

“Mom,” he said, “that corn is not out of condition. I’ve been up on the bin every week since Christmas. I ran the fan just the way Dad wrote it down.”