The Last Corn Elwin Dried

Merritt finished pouring his samples back. Then he came over to me and said the elevator would take the whole bin at four-twelve, nine loads, any time that week, and he would have the girl in the office write the contract up that afternoon so Arlette did not have to worry about the market moving on her.

“I’ll haul the first one this morning,” I told him. “If Arlette will ride along.”

I did not plan to ask her. It came out of my mouth before I thought it. But Arlette looked at me like I had handed her something she had been waiting for, and she said yes, and she went back to the house for her glasses and her purse.

I need to tell you about Elwin and that semi, so you understand. When Elwin quit driving trucks himself, about ten years ago, he started riding along with me every harvest.

Not every load. But the first load of every harvest and the last one, and any time he just felt like getting out.

He always sat the same way. Right hand on the dash, flat, fingers spread, like he was holding the truck steady over the bumps.

Not nervous. He just liked to feel the road come up through it. He would ride with his hand there the whole fourteen miles to the elevator and talk about who had what planted where.

I helped Arlette up into the cab. It is a high step on a semi, and she weighs about as much as a sack of feed, and she took hold of the grab handle and pulled herself up and settled into the passenger seat like she had done it every day of her life. She buckled in. She put her purse on the floor.

Then she reached out and put her right hand flat on the dash, fingers spread. Right where Elwin always put his.

I do not think she knew she did it. Or maybe she did. I never asked her, and I never will.

I pulled out slow, because the yard was icy, and the people by the bin stepped back and lifted their hands as we went by.

Halvor stood at the base of the bin by the auger with his cap off. I saw him in my side mirror the whole way down the drive.

We went the long way, on the gravel past the cemetery. Arlette did not ask me to and I did not say why.

When we went by the hill, she lifted her hand off the dash just a little, an inch maybe, and then she put it back down.

Somewhere past the cemetery she started humming. It took me a mile to place it. “It Is Well With My Soul,” the one they had sung at the funeral, which Elwin had picked out himself years before and written on a card in the family Bible.

She hummed it all the way through, twice, under the sound of the engine.

When we pulled onto the scale at the elevator, Merritt himself came out of the scale house. He did not have to.

He came around to Arlette’s side and waited while I climbed down and came around and helped her down, and then he walked her into the office and got her a chair and a cup of coffee.

The load weighed out at fifty-seven thousand and some pounds of corn, which at fifty-six pounds to the bushel is a little over a thousand bushels.