The Corn Behind the Padlocked Bins

“No.”

“Shelby, he’s your brother, but that’s a boy’s whole crop.”

“I know what it is. If you come home now, you leave the crew short in a storm, and Randy gets a fight he wants. He is counting on a fight, Neil.

He thinks Trent is nineteen and will get angry, or get scared, or get embarrassed, and in any of those three cases it ends with Randy keeping the corn. I am not going to give him one of the three.”

“What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to give him the truth,” I said. “In front of people.”

Neil was quiet again. Then he said, “That’s not like you.”

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

People ask why I did not simply call the sheriff. Years ago, when a neighbor’s cattle got into our field, ours told me kindly that anything between kin is a family matter and he would rather stay out of the middle.

This was a boy’s corn in a locked bin on his uncle’s land with nothing on paper but a handshake. The best a deputy could do was stand in the yard and shrug, and the worst was that the whole county would hear my son’s name in the wrong story.

I did not want Trent to be the boy whose uncle took his corn. I wanted him to be the boy whose corn was weighed, written down and paid for. That was a different story, and I knew where to go to tell it.

We did not go to breakfast. I drove my son out of the lane, past the machine shed, past the big bins, and onto the county road toward town. I held the Folgers can on my lap the whole way.

“I did everything right,” he said at last.

“I know you did.”

“I just wanted Grandpa to see one good crop.” His voice caught on it.

“He will, honey,” I said. I had no idea how yet.

He nodded, though I do not think he did.

“The money is yours,” I said. “Every dollar. I am not going to let anybody tell you different, including him. And you do not have to say a word this morning.

You can just stand there and listen, and keep your hands out of your pockets.”

He pulled his hands out of his pockets and looked at them.

The Farmers Co-op in our town is a pair of tall concrete elevators with a red-and-white sign you can see from three miles out, and a gravel lot, and a scale house and a metal office building where they sell seed and feed and chemical in the spring.

We pulled up behind the last truck at twenty past six, a line that ran halfway down Main Street. I walked past the idling grain trucks with the can on my hip and nodded at Orville Jansen, who is eighty, and at Pat Meier and the Rasmussen boys. They nodded back, a little surprised.

Hollis Lathrop was inside the scale house with a coffee, watching the monitor. He has run that elevator for twenty-six years. He is a heavy man with a gray mustache, and his wife, Judy, stood up at my wedding.

“Shelby,” he said. “What’s wrong?”