The Moisture Tester on His Tailgate

My husband called in from the couch. “What did it read?”

“Fourteen six,” Tate called back.

There was a long quiet from the front room. Then my husband said, “That wheat was not fourteen six. I would bet the house on it. I watched it come out of the hopper.”

He wanted to get up. I could hear him trying.

I went in and put my hand flat on his chest and told him to stay where he was, and he did, but his jaw was set like a fence post.

“I will call Lowell tonight,” he said.

“No,” I said. “You will not.”

He looked at me. I sat down on the edge of the coffee table, where I am not supposed to sit, and I told him what I had been thinking since the kitchen.

It was $640 and a seventeen-year-old’s pride. I did not want a phone fight with my uncle. I wanted a number anyone could read.

A phone call would have turned into family. It would have turned into my mother, and Christmas, and who said what in 1998.

Lowell would have said the meter does not lie, and we would have had nothing but our word against his.

And I did not want a lawyer. You do not hire a lawyer over $640, and you do not teach a boy that the only way to fix a wrong is to pay a stranger to argue for him.

I wanted Tate to have a way to stand up on his own two feet.

“So what do we do?” my husband asked.

Tate was standing in the doorway with his arms crossed. He had been listening.

He had the same look his grandpa used to get when a calf came backwards and nobody else wanted to deal with it.

“I have my meter,” he said. “I bought it with my own money. It reads within about half a point. Fourteen six is two and a half points off. That is not a meter being a little off. That is something else.”

He had bought that tester in May at the farm store in Colby. It cost him $260.

It was a small black handheld unit with a screw cap on top and a little screen, and he had carried it in his glove box since the day he brought it home.

I knew how it worked because he had shown me ten times at the supper table.

You pour your wheat into the cell to the line, you screw the cap down until the clicker slips so it packs the same every time, and the screen gives you moisture and grain temperature.

“Tomorrow,” Tate said, “I am going to test my wheat in the truck line, where people can see me do it. And if anybody else wants their wheat tested, I am going to test theirs too.”

My husband looked at me. I looked at him. Then he laughed, the first real laugh I had heard out of him since the ankle, and he said, “Well, that is the best idea anybody in this house has had all summer.”

That night I lay awake a long time. I prayed for Lowell, which was not easy, and I prayed for Tate, which was.

I asked mostly that my son would stay calm, because a calm boy with a number is hard to argue with, and an angry boy is easy.