The Account I Kept Open Nine Falls

Ray was red to the ears. “I’m too mad at me to be mad at you yet, Amos. Give me a while.”

“Take what you need.”

Marlys shuffled to the table where her scalloped potatoes sat under a dish towel. She dished a portion onto a paper plate, covered it in foil, and put it in my hands. “He always liked mine at the church supper. Tell him I’m not riding in any truck. He comes to my kitchen. I’ll have the coffee on.”

We left at five in Nessa’s Silverado. I took one thing from the shop on the way out.

It hung on two nails on the north wall, where it had hung since the week my brother left: a brass grain probe, forty-eight inches, slots down the shaft, the handle worn dark by two generations of palms. Our father sampled every load he ever hauled with it.

When he died he left it to Grover, and I got the land and thought I had come out ahead. Grover had left it on those nails. I oiled it every April, with a rag, the way I had watched Dad do. I told myself that was maintenance.

I wrapped it in a feed sack and laid it in the back seat beside Marlys’s potatoes.

I remember the Missouri in the dark, a black stripe under the bridge lights, and Nessa asking around midnight whether I was afraid, and my saying no, and her saying, “Good. Because I am.”

The town was two hundred people and a railroad, with an elevator the color of old bone standing higher than the water tower. It was twenty minutes before six. Three trucks idled in line, and the air smelled of diesel and cut stubble, like home. I took my place behind them on purpose. I wanted to be weighed the way he weighed everyone.

A young man in a stocking cap waved me forward with two fingers. I felt the platform take the weight, that long solid sag in the soles of your boots. A speaker on a post crackled with a voice so familiar the back of my neck went cold.

“Morning. Name and what you’re hauling.”

Nessa pressed her knuckles against her collarbone. I had practiced for seven hundred miles, and what came out was nothing I’d practiced.

“Amos Troutt. I’m not hauling anything.”

Through the glass I could see a man at a counter with a pencil, thinner, his hair gone white. The pencil fell and rolled off the counter, and he did not pick it up.

I said, into the post, “Is it still open, Grover?”

Ten seconds of hiss. Then the scale house door opened and my brother stepped out onto the concrete in the early light and stood there with his arms hanging.

“Halbert talked,” he said.

“On his last day. He said I had to ask.”

“Did you?”

“I’m asking now.” I got down and crossed the deck. “I sent you to the phone. It was my order, my word to five kitchens, and I let you carry it and then I handed you the bill. I knew. I told myself I didn’t. I’m sorry. I’ll say it all week.

“And I told them yesterday, in front of the whole town. Marlys, Obert, Pastor. I said the seed was mine and I said what you did.”

“You what?”

“I stood up.”