The Moisture Tester on His Tailgate

The Morning in the Line

Harvest mornings in northwest Kansas do not start early, because you cannot cut wheat until the dew burns off.

By ten o’clock the combine was rolling and Tate had his first load of the day on the trailer.

He hauled with his dad’s old maroon pickup, a one-ton dually with a gooseneck hitch in the bed, pulling a hopper-bottom grain trailer that holds about four hundred bushels.

It is not pretty, but it gets there, and it has gotten there for fourteen years.

I closed out my breakfast shift at the cafe at a quarter to ten and asked Glenna, who runs the register, to cover the lunch prep.

She looked at my face and did not ask why. She just took my apron off the hook and hung it back up.

I drove out to the elevator with a cooler of sandwiches and a jug of iced tea.

The road out there is gravel the last mile, and in July the dust hangs in the air behind every truck like a curtain you have to drive through.

Our elevator is a tall concrete one, the kind you can see for twelve miles, built in the fifties.

The scale house sits at the foot of it with a probe on a boom that swings out over the trucks, and the line stretches back down the road from there.

By the time I got there, the line was nineteen trucks long. There were tandem axle trucks, a couple of semis with hopper trailers, a few pickups with grain trailers like Tate’s.

Most of the men in them had been hauling to this elevator for forty years.

Tate was about two thirds of the way back. He had parked, shut off the engine, and walked around to drop the tailgate.

Even with the gooseneck ball in the bed, there was room on the tailgate for what he needed.

He set down the meter. He set down a stack of plastic cups he had taken out of my pantry, and a coffee can with a lid.

In the coffee can was the sample he had drawn from the top of his own trailer, the way his dad taught him.

He was wearing a faded blue T-shirt that used to be his dad’s. It was so hot already that the gravel shimmered.

I parked on the shoulder behind him and stayed in my car with the window down. This was his to do.

He poured his wheat into the cell. He screwed down the cap until it clicked.

He held the meter still, read it, and wrote the number on a strip of masking tape he stuck to the side of the cup.

He did it three times. Then he wrote the numbers down in a little notebook he kept in his shirt pocket. Twelve point two. Twelve point one. Twelve point two.

The truck ahead of him was an old green tandem with a man sitting in the cab with the door open and one boot on the step.

That was Arvid Steen. He is seventy-one, and he farms about eleven hundred acres east of town with his son.

Arvid wore a white straw cowboy hat and a pearl-snap shirt, the same kind he has worn every harvest I can remember.

He had been watching Tate in his side mirror for a good five minutes before he climbed down and walked back.