The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

I used to find my bike chain oiled and my flat tire patched. He never once said sorry.” “You think that’s what this is?”

“I think it’s the best he knows how to do,” Ben said. “It’s not enough, Stephanie. But it’s the best he’s got.”

I did not answer. I was too tired to decide how I felt about that. Dorothy drove out to the piler on the eleventh day.

She had a pot of beef barley soup in a padded carrier on her passenger seat, and she stood in the gravel lot in her good coat until I came off the ramp, and she waved me down like a woman flagging a train.

“You’re thin,” she said, pushing the pot at me through the window. “I’m fine, Dorothy.”

“You are not fine. You are a person who has been eating sandwiches in a truck for eleven days.”

She looked up at Unit 7, at the frost on the mirrors, at the pile rising behind the scale house. “Ben told me how many loads.”

“Fourteen.” “Every day?” “Every day.” She stood there with her hands in her pockets, a small seventy-four-year-old woman in the wind.

“I told Shane that if you quit, I would never speak to him again,” she said. “I told him I’d put it in writing.”

“Dorothy.” “I did not say it kindly, and I will not apologize.” Her mouth was trembling. “His father would be ashamed. Not of what he was afraid of. Of what he did about it.”

I ate the soup in the cab with the heater going, and I thought it was the best thing I had ever put in my mouth.

On the thirteenth day, the last field came in.

The campaign does not end with a ceremony. It ends when the last truck unloads the last beet from the last field, and the harvester shuts down, and the loader operators climb out of their seats, and the drivers sit in their cabs for a minute with their hands on the wheels, not quite ready to believe it.

I had hauled a hundred and eighty-two loads in thirteen shifts. Fourteen a day, no exceptions, no sick days. I knew the number because I had counted it, in my head, on every ride home.

At 3:40 that afternoon I came up Highway 17 with my fourteenth load of the last day and I saw a crowd at the piler.

Not a crowd. A group. Twenty or thirty people standing on the gravel in the cold sunlight, hands in their pockets, in their hats and their coats.

Hank Olson. Brayden. Marv from the loader. Clarence Hegg at the edge of the platform with his clipboard under his arm. Half the drivers on the contract.

And on the ramp, right where the trucks line up to enter the hopper, Shane Lund stood alone in the middle of the gravel with his hat in one hand.

I slowed the truck. I thought for a moment that I should stop altogether.

Then he lifted his other hand, and I could not tell, from sixty feet away through a bug-spattered windshield, whether it was a wave or a stop.

I brought Unit 7 up the ramp at a crawl. I set the brake. I rolled my window down. “Stephanie,” Shane said.

He was holding an envelope, a long white business envelope, soft at the corners the way an envelope gets when it has been handled a lot. His hands were not steady.