On the last Friday of October, Halbert Quarnstrom came out of the scale house with his coffee in one hand and two fingers up in the air, and I stopped my truck on the platform with my front tires still on the concrete.
That is how you stop a man at a truck scale. Two fingers, palm out. Halbert had done it to every farmer in Dray Prairie, South Dakota, for forty-one years, and not one of us had ever argued with it.
I was bringing in the last load of the year. Sixty-three thousand pounds gross, corn at fifteen percent, test weight fifty-six and a half, the cleanest crop I had raised in a decade. I had been in a good mood since breakfast. I did not stay in one.
“Shut her off, Amos,” Halbert said. “Come inside.”
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Halbert has a voice like a gravel truck backing up, and in all those years I had never heard it go quiet. It was quiet now. That was what got my hand to the key.
I was sixty years old that morning, and I thought I knew everything there was to know about that building. I will tell you what I knew, the way I understood it for nine years, and then I will tell it the way it was. The two versions are about the width of a man apart.
My brother is Grover. He is three years younger than I am, and he could do sums in his head before he could ride a bicycle. We farmed together as Troutt Brothers, fourteen hundred acres our grandfather homesteaded in 1911, corn and soybeans and a little spring wheat on the high ground.
I ran the fields and the machinery and the people. Grover ran the paper. For twenty-two years that split worked like a good pair of mules.
Then came the spring I call the spring of the seed.
I was fifty-one and I was tired of being careful. Two years running we had made a living and nothing more, and I wanted one big move before my knees quit.
A seed salesman named Cordell Pfahl sat in my shop with a binder and a cooler of pop and told me about a corn hybrid that beat anything in the county by thirty bushels. A hundred and eight days. If you got a normal fall, it would make you a rich man.
And there was a deal. Order four hundred bags as a group and the price dropped a dime on the dollar, with a written yield promise from the salesman himself.
Four hundred bags was more than Troutt Brothers could use, so I went and found the rest of the group. I did that part on purpose, with a handshake and a hand on a shoulder.
I stopped at five kitchens that month: Ray Fadness, Obert Sundby, Lindy Haugen, the Brekkes, and Marlys and Ivar Ostrander on the quarter that touched ours at the creek. I had known those families since diapers. I drank their coffee and said, “I have looked at this hard. I would not steer you wrong.”
They all signed on. A man who counts the Sunday plate does not have to ask twice.
The order itself went in on a Tuesday afternoon in March. I was in the machine shed. Grover was at the little desk in the corner doing the books, and I said over my shoulder, “Call Halbert and put in for the hundred and eight day, four hundred bags, same as we talked about. I’ve got hay down.”