The Moisture Tester on His Tailgate

The Window

The scale house at our elevator has a sliding window on the driver’s side so you can hand your paperwork in without leaving your cab.

Lowell sits behind it on a stool, with the sample meter on a counter to his left and the ticket printer to his right.

When a truck pulls on the scale, he swings the probe out over the load and drops it in.

It is a long hollow tube with a vacuum, and it pulls grain up out of several spots in the box and drops it into a bucket inside the scale house.

He runs that sample through the elevator’s bench meter, which is a big tan machine that cost the company more than my car.

It weighs the sample, reads the moisture and temperature, and the number comes up on a screen facing him.

He keys the number onto the ticket. The ticket prints. He hands it out the window.

The farmer looks at it, says thanks, and drives up onto the dump pit to unload. That is how it goes, a hundred and fifty times a day in harvest.

What the farmer never sees, sitting up high in a cab, is the screen. You see the ticket.

You trust that the number on the ticket is the number on the screen, because why would it not be?

Arvid did not walk to the driver’s window. He walked around to the door of the scale house.

It is a steel door with a little square window in it, and in nineteen summers I do not think I had ever seen a farmer knock on it.

He knocked.

Lowell opened it. He was wearing his elevator cap and his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and he looked at Arvid, and then he looked past Arvid at the line, and I watched his face go still.

I could not hear what they said. I was too far back.

But I could see Arvid hold up the cup with the tape on it, and then the ticket, and then point back down the line at Tate’s tailgate.

Lowell said something short. Arvid said something shorter. Then Arvid did not go back to his truck.

He just stood there at the door, in the sun, in that white straw hat, holding his cup.

Tate came up next to my car. He leaned down to the window. “Mom,” he said. “What do I do?”

“Nothing,” I said. “You did it already. Now you stand by your truck and you let the men in this line decide what they want to do with their own wheat.”

He looked like he wanted to argue. Then he nodded and went back to his tailgate.

He put the cap back on the meter and set it down and crossed his arms, and he just stood there.

What the men in that line decided was to walk past Lowell. Not to the door of the scale house.

Around the back of it, to the office, where Burl Hagan, the elevator manager, keeps a desk with a window unit air conditioner and a coffee pot that is always on.

They did not go all at once. One went, and then two more, and then the woman with the braid, and then the brothers.

They carried their tickets. Some of them carried their cups with Tate’s tape still on the side.

By one o’clock, a dozen farmers had gone around Lowell to Burl’s office. I counted. Nobody shouted. Nobody shoved.

Every one of them took his hat off when he went in the door, because that is how you go into a man’s office out here.