The Beet Truck Nobody Else Would Drive

“Before you dump,” he said. “If you don’t mind.” I did not mind. I turned the engine off. The whole yard had gone quiet.

I could hear the piler’s boom ticking over in the wind, the far hum of the factory trucks on the highway, a flock of geese honking somewhere over the stubble fields.

Shane cleared his throat. “I was wrong,” he said. “I was wrong in front of everybody, so I figure I should say it in front of everybody.”

Nobody moved. “I gave my brother’s truck to a man who couldn’t pass a medical, because I was scared of the number. I told myself it was business. I told myself a woman couldn’t last.

That was a lie I told so I wouldn’t have to look at what I was doing.” He swallowed. “I looked at you on that step at four in the morning, scraping frost with a credit card.

And I couldn’t think of one decent thing to say, so I said the stupidest one.” “Shane,” I said. “Let me finish.” He held up the envelope.

“The co-op wrote up Lund Hauling for coming up short on quota nine days this campaign. Twenty-three hundred dollars. I paid it out of my own account.

I did not take one cent of it out of anybody’s load.” He glanced at Hank, who nodded.

“Greg Pfeiffer paid me back eight hundred of it, for the day he cost us, and I told him that’s the last Legion night I’m going to hold against him.”

A few people laughed, softly. It was not unkind. “In this envelope,” Shane said, “is a check made out to Ben Lund for seven thousand, four hundred sixty-two dollars.

That’s a hundred eighty-two loads at forty-one dollars. It’s the full driver’s share, nothing held back for fuel I should have paid myself.”

He took a breath. “And there’s a second check. Eight hundred sixty-one dollars. That’s the day and a half Unit 7 sat behind my shop because of me.”

He held out the envelope. I looked at it. I looked at his hand.

I had rehearsed a number of things to say to Shane, over thirteen shifts, in the dark, with the heater going. Cold things. True things. None of them came.

“It’s not mine to take,” I said. “It’s Ben’s.” “I know. I’m going to drive it to him myself, if you’ll let me.

And I’d like to say it to him, standing up.” He swallowed again. “But I wanted you to see it first, because you earned every dollar in it.”

I took the envelope. It weighed almost nothing. “One more thing,” Shane said. “Clarence?”

Clarence came down off the platform with the clipboard and turned it around so I could read it, and I saw, in his careful green block letters, a line at the bottom of the contract sheet for the season.

Unit 7. M. Lund, driver. 182 loads. 0 missed. “I asked the co-op to put it on the record,”

Shane said. “You’re on the paper now. Next fall, if you want it, Unit 7 has your name on the door.”

I felt my throat close. I looked down at my hands on the wheel, at the dirt in the creases of my knuckles, black and permanent, the same dirt that was on Ben’s hands every fall of his life.