The Last Corn Elwin Dried

Arlette looked at him a long moment. Then she looked at me. She is not a foolish woman and she never has been, and I watched her put it together, slow, the way you watch a storm come across a field.

“Then why would Duane tell me that?” she said, quiet.

Nobody answered her. The clock over the stove ticked. Out the window, her two barn cats were sitting on the well cover in the sun like they owned the place.

I know what some people would have said, sitting where I sat. Call a lawyer. Call the sheriff.

Tell Duane to get off the place and never come back. I thought all three of those things. But Arlette got there before I could open my mouth.

“I will not have family suing family,” she said. “Not over Elwin’s corn. Not over anything. He would roll over in his grave. If Duane told a lie, then Duane told a lie, and the Lord can deal with Duane.”

“Then we just prove it,” I said. “We don’t argue with him. We don’t call anybody but Merritt. We open the bin and let him see it. The only proof that matters in this county is corn running out of a spout.”

Arlette thought about that. She folded her napkin twice, in a perfect square. “All right,” she said. “But I want to be there when you open it. And I want it to be morning. Elwin always said you look at grain in good light.”

Halvor called Duane that night from our kitchen. I listened from the sink. He did not raise his voice once.

He told Duane he had been up on the bin and it was sound, and he asked Duane why he had told the buyer otherwise.

I could hear Duane through the phone, loud, the way he gets. He said Halvor was no grain man.

He said he had stuck his own arm in that bin at Christmas and it came out warm and stinking.

He said he was trying to help a widow and he would not be called a liar in his own father’s house.

“It’s not your father’s house anymore, Duane,” Halvor said. “It’s Mom’s. And I’m not calling you anything. I’m telling you the buyer is coming out Tuesday morning and you’re welcome to come watch.”

Duane hung up on him. Halvor set the phone down on the counter very gently, the way he sets down anything he would rather throw.

Then he went out to the shop, and I let him go, because a man like Halvor needs a wrench in his hand after a call like that.

I found out the rest later, the way you find things out in a county like ours. Duane had borrowed against his own crop the spring before, an operating note at the bank, and then he had sold forward on a contract he could not fill when his dryland corn burned up in August.

He was short. He had a note coming due on the first of April and nothing in his own bins to cover it.

Buying Arlette’s corn at two-ten and selling it at four and change would have covered most of what he owed. That was his reason.

I will say it plainly, because I have thought about it a long time. A man in trouble is a man in trouble, and I have been close enough to it myself in a bad year to feel the cold of it.