The Moisture Tester on His Tailgate

The Pop Machine

When it was over, Burl walked the corrected tickets out and handed them to each person himself.

When he got to Tate, he shook his hand, the way you shake a grown man’s hand, and said, “You did this right, son. You did it in daylight where everybody could see.”

Tate’s new tickets put his six loads at dry. No shrink. No drying charge. Burl told him the difference would be on his settlement that week.

It came to $640.12, and I know because Tate had already done the math in his notebook.

The men drifted back to their trucks. The line had to keep moving.

There was wheat in the field and the combines were waiting and the sun was still high. Harvest does not stop for anything, even a thing like that.

Arvid did not go back to his truck right away. He walked over to the pop machine that sits on a concrete pad by the scale house, under a little tin roof.

It is red and old and it still takes quarters, though most people use dollar bills now.

He fed it two dollar bills and got out a cold can of orange pop, and he walked it over to Tate’s tailgate and held it out.

Tate took it. He did not open it right away. He just held it against the back of his neck, where the sunburn was.

Arvid leaned back against the tailgate next to him, both of them looking up the line at the elevator, and he said, “My grandpa stood in this line in 1951. Same elevator. They had just finished building it that spring.”

Tate turned and looked at him.

“He hauled with horses the first few years he farmed,” Arvid said.

“By ’51 he had a little truck. Two-ton, I think, with wooden sideboards. He was still hauling in that same truck in the sixties, when I was a boy riding in the cab.”

He was quiet for a minute. The dust was settling on the road.

Somewhere up ahead, a truck on the dump pit opened its gate and you could hear the wheat run, that hiss it makes going down through the grate.

“He used to bite his wheat,” Arvid said. “Right there in the line. He would chew a few kernels and tell you whether it was dry, and he was never wrong once. I always thought nobody would ever know wheat like that again.”

He tapped the meter on the tailgate with one finger.

“Turns out somebody does,” he said. “He just carries a gadget.”

Tate laughed, and then he did not laugh, and I saw him wipe his eyes with the back of the hand that was holding the pop can.

Arvid put a hand on his shoulder for just a second, the way old men do, then took it off and walked back to his truck.

I stood by my car and cried like a fool, and I am not even a little bit ashamed of it.