The Corn Behind the Padlocked Bins

I set the Folgers can on the desk between us. Then I took out the rubber-banded stacks and laid them down one at a time in order. The seed invoice from the dealer in town, twenty-four hundred dollars.

The fertilizer and chemical invoices, sixteen hundred fifty. The notebook with the plant counts.

And the church bulletin with Helen Ostrander’s rent receipt on the back of it, five thousand two hundred fifty dollars, in her shaky ballpoint hand.

Trent stood by the door with his arms at his sides. Out the window, the line of trucks inched forward one length.

“Hollis,” I said, “I need you to tell me what these say.”

He put on his reading glasses and picked up the first scale ticket.

He read it the way you read something you have written yourself, with his lips pressing together at the numbers, and then he turned it over to check that his initials were on the back, which they were.

“This is the nineteenth of October,” he said. “Single axle, International, Hartman. Gross, 38,240. Tare, 17,520. Net, 20,720 pounds. That’s, what, 370 bushels. Moisture, 17.1.” He looked up. “That’s Trent’s corn.”

“Read the rest,” I said.

He read all eleven. He took his time.

“Two hundred twenty-nine thousand, six hundred pounds,” he said. “That’s four thousand one hundred bushels, near as makes no difference.

At what we posted this morning, $3.91 cash, it comes to a little over sixteen thousand dollars.” He put the calculator down. “Where is it now?”

“In the two old bins on the home place,” I said. “With chains on them.”

Hollis did not ask whose chains. He is not a man who needs it said twice.

“Trent,” he said. “Did you give your uncle a dime, a bushel, or a signature for those bins?”

“No, sir. I offered him seventeen hundred dollars in October for the combining and the storage. He said we’d settle up in the spring.”

“Seventeen hundred.” Hollis nodded slowly. “That’s about right. Custom combining runs thirty-five an acre around here, a little over a thousand for thirty. Storage and drying on four thousand bushels, six, seven hundred. You offered fair, son.”

“Yes, sir.”

“That’s all I needed to know.” He stood up, and it took him a moment, because his knees are bad. “Shelby, you want to tell me what you want me to do?”

I had thought about that for six miles. “I don’t want you to do anything to him,” I said. “I don’t want a scene, and I don’t want anybody hurt. I want you to say what’s true to anybody who asks. That’s all.”

“And if he comes in here?”

I looked out the window. A pickup I had known since I was ten years old had just pulled into the line, six trucks back, with a thermos on the dash and a trailer behind it hauling about nine hundred bushels of Randy’s own corn.

“Then I suppose he’ll find out how it works,” I said.

Randy came up the line truck by truck. I watched him from the scale house window, a man of fifty-one in a frayed barn coat, with my father’s walk. I wanted him to turn around, drive back to the home place, and open those bins before he ever reached the scale.

He did not.

He pulled onto the scale at 7:05 and stopped with his front wheels on the steel.