What Lowell Said
When Burl finished, there were nine loads on the second pile. Six were Tate’s. One was Arvid’s. One was the widow’s, and one was the old bachelor’s.
All nine had been keyed onto tickets more than a point and a half higher than the bench meter read.
Burl did not yell either. I think that is what got me most. Nobody yelled the whole day.
He just turned to Lowell in front of that window, with the men standing outside on the gravel, and asked one question.
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“Why?”
Lowell’s face was gray. He looked older than sixty-six. He looked at Burl and then at the window, and when he saw me there behind Arvid, his face did something I had not seen it do since my grandmother’s funeral.
“The company’s been on me about shrink all spring,” he said. His voice was low, but the window was open and it carried.
“Every quarter they send the numbers. Every quarter we are short. They said they wanted the moisture discounts up to cover it.”
Shrink, for anybody who has not worked at an elevator, is the difference between the bushels you take in and the bushels you ship out.
Grain dries in the bin, some gets lost in handling, and the company watches that number like a hawk.
“So you took it from a seventeen-year-old,” Burl said. “And from Arvid. And from a widow.”
Lowell did not answer that. He did not have to. Everybody standing at that window already knew he picked the ones he thought would never argue.
The kid on his first harvest. The old man who lets four tenths go. The widow who does not like to make a fuss.
He took $640 out of a boy’s first paycheck because he thought the boy was too young to fight and his mother was too polite.
He was half right about the second part. He was all the way wrong about the boy.
Burl wrote something on his clipboard. Then he looked out the window at all of us and said, plain, “Every one of these nine loads is getting regraded at the number that meter just read, in front of you. The checks will be cut new. I will hand them out myself.”
Then he looked at Lowell and said, “And you are going to key in the corrected tickets. Right now. Where they can watch you do it.”
Lowell sat back down on his stool. He pulled up the first ticket on the computer and keyed in the new number with one finger, slowly, like a man who has forgotten how to type.
He did all nine, and nobody at that window said a single word while he did.