The Moisture Tester on His Tailgate

“What are you doing back here, son?” he asked. He was not unkind about it.

He was curious, the way an old farmer gets curious when a young one is doing something he has not seen before.

“Testing my wheat,” Tate said. “The scale has me wet two days running. My meter says I am dry. I am testing it out here where anybody can watch, so nobody can say I did anything to it.”

Arvid looked at the meter and then he looked at Tate’s face. Then he took his hat off, wiped his forehead with the back of his wrist, and put it back on.

“What did they have you at?”

“Fourteen eight Monday. Fourteen six yesterday.”

Arvid did not say anything for a second. Then he reached into the chest pocket of that pearl-snap shirt and came out with a folded ticket of his own.

He opened it on the tailgate and smoothed it flat with his palm.

“They had me at thirteen nine yesterday,” he said. “I figured I cut a little early on the low ground. I did not think anything of it. It was four tenths over, and I just let it go.”

“Do you want me to test it?” Tate asked.

Arvid looked at him for a long time. Then he said, “Son, I would like to be the first one you test.”

He walked back to his truck, climbed up the side ladder with more ease than a man of seventy-one should have, and came back down with a coffee can of his own wheat.

He said he had pulled it off the top of the load that morning, same as always.

Tate poured it into a cup. He poured some of that into the cell and screwed the cap down.

Arvid leaned in over his shoulder to read the screen, both hands on the tailgate, his hat brim almost touching Tate’s hair.

Eleven point eight.

Tate ran it again. Eleven point nine. He ran it a third time. Eleven point eight.

He wrote all three numbers on a strip of tape and stuck it to the cup, and then he wrote Arvid’s name on it in marker.

“That wheat is not going to be thirteen nine at that window,” Arvid said quietly. “Not today. Not in this heat.”

“No, sir,” Tate said. “It should not be.”