The Last Corn Elwin Dried

“Halvor scooped the crust,” Duane said. “He told you himself.”

“He did,” Merritt said. “He brought me the bucket this morning before you got here. About ten bushels off the peak, under the hatch, from the frost. That’s one bucket out of nine thousand bushels, and he showed it to me, which you didn’t. You told me the whole bin smelled musty. You stood in my scale house and told me that.”

Duane opened his mouth and then shut it. His face had gone a dark color, and I do not think it was the cold.

“I bought corn off your dad for thirty years,” Merritt said. He said it quietly, so that only the people near the tailgate could hear, but the yard was so still that everybody heard.

“I won’t be buying any off you. Not this spring. I’d take some time to think about why.”

That was all he said. He did not say it mean. He said it the way you would tell a man his tire was low.

Then he turned his back on Duane, picked up his pans, and started pouring the samples back into the top of my trailer, so not a kernel of Arlette’s corn would go to waste.

Arlette looked at Duane then. I want to tell this part right, because it is the part people ask me about.

She did not raise her voice. She did not cry. She stood there in her husband’s coat with the ticket buttoned in the pocket, small and straight, and she looked at that boy she had raised every summer as her own.

“Your father dried this corn, Duane,” she said. “He was up every two hours with it. He wrote down the fan in his book every day until he died, and your brother kept writing it after. You knew all that. You told me the buyer wouldn’t touch it.”

“Arlette,” Duane said. “I’m in a bad way. You don’t know.”

“I know you’re in a bad way,” she said. “I knew it at Christmas. If you had come and asked me, I’d have helped you. I would have. You know I would have. But you didn’t ask me, honey. You told me Elwin’s last crop was rotten so you could buy it for half.”

She did not say anything else. She did not have to. Duane stood there a few seconds longer, in his good jacket and his town boots, with the whole coffee shop watching him from the fence line.

Then he got in his pickup and backed down the drive, slower than he had come up it.

They had seen what they came to see, and they were not going to stand in Arlette’s yard and talk about her stepson in front of her.

Instead, one of the coffee shop men walked over to Halvor and shook his hand, and then another one did, and then they just stood around the auger and talked about the price of fertilizer and whether the river would come up this spring, the way men do when something big has happened and they are not going to say so.

Doris poured coffee out of Arlette’s thermos into the foam cups and handed them around. The farm wives came over and stood with Arlette for a while.

One of them said Elwin always did keep a nice bin. Another one said, “Well, Arlette,” and patted her arm, and that was the whole speech.