The Account I Kept Open Nine Falls

A laugh broke out of him and cracked in the middle. “In front of Obert?”

“He was holding a poem.”

“I didn’t think you could, Amos. I swear I didn’t. I thought it would kill you.”

“It nearly did. You were right about me. You were only wrong about the last part. I didn’t know it myself till yesterday.”

I watched a man put down a load he has carried a long way. The shoulders came down. The jaw let go. He took one step and I took one, and then there was no space left to cross. His coat smelled of grain dust and coffee and cold, and under it, faintly, of our father’s shop.

Behind us a horn tooted, politely. “Beau,” Grover said, not letting go, “hold that truck.”

Nessa had gotten out. “You are too thin,” she said. “I brought potatoes.”

I carried the probe out of the truck in both hands and held it out. “It’s been on the wall. I oiled it every spring.”

He ran his thumb down the slots to the place near the handle where Dad’s grip had worn the brass dark. “You did that.”

“I thought it was maintenance.”

“Dad used to say you can’t know a man’s load by the top of it. You’ve got to go all the way down.” He wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist and didn’t hide it. “Come in. I’ll make coffee. It’s terrible. You’ll love it.”

“Marlys says you’re to come to her kitchen.”

“That woman told me in a parking lot I’d shamed my mother.”

“She’s got the coffee on.”

He put his arm around my shoulder and walked me toward the scale house door, the way I had walked a thousand farmers into mine.

The coffee was terrible. He had told the truth about that. We sat on two metal chairs with the line of trucks backed up outside, and Beau, the young man in the stocking cap, weighed every one of them himself and never once looked in at us.

Before we left, Grover pulled a ticket pad off the counter and wrote G. Troutt on the top sheet and E. Troutt on the one beneath. He tore them apart and handed me mine.

“Both open,” he said.

On Sunday afternoon the three of us sat in Marlys Ostrander’s kitchen in Dray Prairie, and she had the coffee on. She put a plate in front of Grover before he had his coat off. She did not say sorry and he did not ask her to. She patted his cheek twice, the way you pat a boy who has come in late for supper.

“You’re thin,” she said.

It has cost me already, and I won’t say it hasn’t. Ray Fadness did not pick up when I called him Saturday noon. Lindy Haugen’s husband looked past me in the church lot this morning. Pastor Aasen asked me to stand at the front and say all of it again, and I told him I would.

Grover is coming for Thanksgiving, through the front door, in daylight, with the whole family at the table.

The scale does not care about reasons. That is what I have come to love about it. It never asks why you were late, or who you’ve been angry with since the spring of the seed. It asks what you came in carrying and what you were carrying already, then tells the truth about the difference, to the pound, and lets you go.