The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

“I don’t want the door,” I said finally. Shane’s face dropped. “I want my husband back in the cab with his name on it, and a seat next to him for a week when it’s cold.” I looked up. “That’s what I want.”

“Done,” he said, so fast it nearly broke in his mouth.

Somebody in the crowd started to clap. It was Hank Olson, slow and heavy, a big man’s applause. Then Marv. Then Brayden.

Then all of them on that gravel lot, in the thin October light, thirty people and one tired woman in a beet truck with an envelope in her lap.

I dumped my last load. The twenty-four tons came off the trailer in a long, thundering rush. Out on the pile the boom swung slowly over, laying the last of the beets down on the heap.

The whole wall stood steaming in the cold under the huge pale sky, a long ridge of winter sugar, every ton of it hauled by somebody who needed it to get there.

I drove home. I let Shane follow me the whole four miles in his pickup.

When I turned into our drive, Addie was standing on the porch in her socks with her braid half undone, and Ben was behind her in the doorway with his cast against his chest.

I got out. I handed Addie the long white envelope and she looked at me with enormous eyes. “Is it the beets?” she asked.

“It’s the beets,” I said. “Take it to Daddy.”

She ran. And I stood in the gravel with my hands in my coat pockets and watched the two brothers meet, the tall one on the bottom step with his hat in his hands, the other in the doorway with his arm in a cast, neither of them saying anything for a very long moment.

Then Ben put his good hand on his brother’s shoulder. I turned and went into the barn to give them privacy.

I stayed there a long time, among the tools and the cold, with the beet dirt still under my nails.

On Monday I went back to Dr. Halvorson’s office and cleaned teeth. “How was the month?” he asked, when I came in.

“Long,” I said. “I hauled a hundred and eighty-two loads.” That night I washed my hands at the kitchen sink for twenty minutes and they never did come clean, not really, not all the way, not until Christmas. I did not mind.

Addie’s drawing was on the refrigerator by then, under a magnet shaped like a sugar beet, a big white truck with a stick person in the cab and a braid that went on forever.

Ben came up behind me while I was drying my hands. “You were right,” he said into my hair. “About the stands.”

“I know.” “Next fall,” he said, “we’re driving it together.” “Next fall,” I said, “you’re sitting in the passenger seat with the thermos.”

He laughed. It was the first real laugh I had heard out of him in a month.

Out the window over the sink, in the last light, I could see the frost coming down on the stubble and, past the road and the elevator and the long pale line of the horizon, the glow where the piles at the piling station steamed gently, patiently, under the huge autumn sky.