The Moisture Tester on His Tailgate

The second scale ticket was folded twice and soft from my son’s back pocket, and he set it on my kitchen counter the way you would set down something that might bite you.

“Fourteen point six,” Tate said. “Yesterday he wrote fourteen point eight. My meter said twelve point one both days, Mom. Twelve point one. I checked it three times on every load.”

I was still in my cafe apron. I had come home at two that afternoon to make sandwiches for the field, and the bread was out on the counter next to that ticket, and I remember I kept holding the knife.

Tate was seventeen. He was sunburned across the back of the neck and the tops of his ears, and his shaggy brown hair needed cutting, and he had wheat chaff stuck in the sweat on his arms all the way to the elbow.

That summer he was hauling his first wheat off 160 rented acres his dad and I had helped him take on.

It was his ground for the year, his rent, his seed bill, his crop. Whatever was left at the end was his.

“Who graded it?” I asked, though I already knew. There is only one man who works the probe at our elevator during harvest, and he has done it for nineteen summers.

“Uncle Lowell,” Tate said. He looked at the floor when he said it.

“He probed the load, ran it, and wrote it down. He said the meter does not lie. He said I could take it somewhere else if I did not like it.”

Somewhere else was forty miles round trip with a load on.

In the middle of harvest, with the combine waiting on the trailer, that is not a choice. Lowell knew that as well as anybody alive.

Lowell Pruitt is my mother’s younger brother. He is sixty-six.

He taught me to drive a stick shift in the church parking lot when I was fifteen, and he cried at my wedding harder than my own father did.

I picked up the ticket and read it. Gross weight, tare weight, net bushels, test weight, moisture, and the discount line.

Elevators around here call wheat dry at thirteen and a half percent. Anything over that gets shrink and a drying charge taken off.

Between the two days and six loads, Tate had hauled 2,310 bushels. The bid was $5.54.

With both tickets marked wet, the discounts came to about five percent of the whole value. I did the math on the back of the bread bag. It was $640.

“That is your seed money,” I said.

“That is most of my seed money,” Tate said. “And it is wheat that was dry, Mom. You can bite it. It cracks. It does not chew like wet wheat chews. Anybody who has hauled wheat for a week knows what dry wheat feels like in your teeth.”

My husband was on the couch in the front room with his left foot up on two pillows and a walking boot strapped to it.

He had stepped wrong off the combine ladder the second week of June and broken his ankle in two places.

He could not drive the truck. He could not work a clutch. He could not climb onto the combine.

That was the whole reason Tate was hauling alone, and a neighbor’s hired man, Wylie, was running our old combine for us by the hour.