The Last Corn Elwin Dried

But there is no trouble on God’s earth that makes it right to lie to a widow about the last crop her husband dried.

Monday I called Merritt Bauer at the elevator. I told him what Halvor had found. I told him Arlette wanted him to see it himself, and I asked him if he would drive out.

He was quiet on the line for a few seconds, and I could hear the dryer running behind him.

“Wendy, I’ll be honest,” he said. “I don’t drive out to the farm for most people. I’ve got a probe and a tester in the pickup and I’ll bring them. But if I find musty corn, I’m going to say so, and I’m going to say so in front of Arlette.”

“That’s all we want,” I told him. “Say what you find. Tuesday, eight o’clock?”

“Eight o’clock,” he said. “Have a truck under the spout.”

Monday afternoon Halvor and I went over every inch of the setup. He checked the unload auger under the bin floor and the gearbox on the power take-off shaft.

He hooked the tractor to the swing auger and greased the bearings. He swept the snow off the pad in front of the bin with the loader.

I washed out the trailer, which I do anyway, but I did it twice. I opened the hopper doors and swept every corner.

If Merritt was going to find something wrong with that corn, it was not going to be from somebody else’s leftover grain in the bottom of my semi.

Then Halvor did the thing I did not ask him to do. He climbed the ladder on the side of the bin to the roof, all twenty-some feet of it, in the wind, and opened the top hatch.

He stuck his hand probe down in four places as far as his arm would reach. He put his face to the hatch and breathed in.

When he came down, his cheeks were red from the cold. “Sweet,” he said, and held out his hand to me with a fistful of corn in it.

It was bright yellow, hard, cold as a creek stone. I put my nose to it. It smelled like nothing but corn, sweet and dry, like the inside of a feed sack.

“There was a little ring of crust at the very peak in January,” he told me. “Where the frost dripped off the roof. Maybe ten bushels. I broke it up with a rod and scooped it out the hatch the same week. I’ve got it in a bucket in the shop. I’ll show Merritt that too.”

That is the kind of man I married. He would rather show the buyer the ten bad bushels himself than let anybody say he hid them.

Elwin’s notebook was on the seat of the tractor. It was one of those little spiral books from the feed store with a seed corn ad on the cover, and every page was in his square pencil printing.

Fan on. Fan off. Outside temperature. Hours. The dates ran right up to the week he died.

After that, the handwriting changed. It was Halvor’s, a little slanted, a little messier. Same columns. Same notes.

Fan on, cold and dry, nineteen degrees. Fan off, fog. He had kept his father’s book all winter and never said a word about it to anybody.

I sat in the tractor cab and turned those pages for a long time.