The Last Corn Elwin Dried

He stood by his door for a moment and looked at the five pickups on the fence line and the people standing by the bin, and I watched him understand that he was late.

Nobody went to him. Nobody said hello. Doris kept hold of Arlette’s arm. The coffee shop men looked at him once and then looked back at Merritt on the trailer ladder, which was worse than if they had said something. In a place like ours, that look is a sentence.

Merritt did not stop. He did the fifth spot, and then the sixth, the very back corner of the rear hopper.

Then he climbed down with his pan and his tester and walked over to the tailgate of his own pickup, which put him about six feet from the front bumper of Duane’s.

He laid the pans out in a row on his tailgate. He went down the line one more time with his nose.

Then he took a small pad of tickets out of the pocket of his quarter-zip, clicked his pen, and wrote for what felt like a long time.

When he finished, he did not hand the ticket to me. He did not hand it to Halvor. He looked across the yard and said, “Mrs. Ostlund, would you come over here, please?”

Arlette let go of Doris’s arm and walked over to the tailgate. She walked slow, because it was icy in the ruts, and Halvor came down off the auger and walked beside her without touching her, just close enough. They stopped at the tailgate, right there in front of Duane’s pickup.

Merritt held the ticket out to her with both hands, the way you would hand somebody something at a funeral.

She took it and held it out at arm’s length, because she had left her glasses in the house.

Then she handed it to me. “Read it out, Wendy,” she said. “My eyes.”

I read it out loud. I did not try to make my voice do anything. I just read what he wrote.

“Moisture fourteen point eight. Six probes. No mold. No odor. No heat damage. Test weight fifty-seven. Number two yellow, sound. Bid four dollars and twelve cents a bushel, all of it, nine thousand, at the elevator. Merritt Bauer.” Then underneath, in smaller letters: “Elwin’s corn. Same as always.”

One of the farm wives put her hand over her mouth. Doris made a little sound I will remember until I die, half a laugh and half something else.

Arlette took the ticket back from me and folded it once and put it in the pocket of Elwin’s barn coat.

Then she buttoned the pocket. I had never seen anybody button a coat pocket on purpose before.

Duane had not moved from beside his pickup. He looked at the ticket going into the pocket. Then he looked at Merritt.

“That’s one load off the bottom,” he said. “The top’s where it went bad. You’ll find it when you get up there.”

Merritt turned and looked at him. He is not a big man, Merritt, but he has stood at a scale house window for thirty-some years and taken a lot of people’s word for things. He took his time before he answered.

“Duane,” he said, “this is the first thousand bushels out of the center gate. That’s the corn from the top of the pile coming right down the middle. If the top was bad, I would have seen it first. I’ve been doing this since you were in high school.”