Hollis came out of the scale house and walked to the driver’s window, and I came behind him, and so did Trent, a few steps back. Randy rolled down the window.
When he saw me, the color went out of his face in a way I had never seen it do.
“Shelby,” he said. “What’s this?”
“Morning, Randy,” Hollis said. He is a courteous man, and he said it the way he says everything. “I’ll need you to pull off the scale and up to the side for a minute.”
“I’ve got nine hundred bushels here. I’ve got a line behind me.”
“I know you do.” Hollis’s voice did not rise. He did not need it to.
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“I can’t take that load today, or tomorrow, or any day, until I know whose corn is in those two small bins on your home place.
I have eleven tickets in my office with Trent Hartman’s name on them for four thousand one hundred bushels, and I know where they went.
If you haul any of that corn to me, or sell any of it anywhere, I would be buying a boy’s crop off a man who didn’t raise it. I won’t do that. It’s the same rule for everybody here.”
Randy looked at him as if he had said something in a foreign language. “Hollis. Come on. This is family business.”
“Then you can settle it with family. But I’m not scaling a bushel for you until it’s settled.”
Behind Randy’s truck, the horn of the next rig tapped once, politely, and then stopped. A door opened somewhere down the line.
Orville Jansen got out of his cab and stood with one hand on the mirror, watching, and then the Rasmussen boys did the same, and then I saw Pat Meier lean out his window with his cap pushed back.
Randy looked at the line. Then he looked at me.
He was a man of fifty-one with his whole fall sitting in the bed of his truck, with a note due at the bank on the fifteenth of November and thirty-eight thousand bushels more in his own bins waiting on the same scale.
“Pull off, Randy,” Hollis said again, quietly. “Let the folks behind you in.”
He pulled off. He parked at the edge of the gravel, killed the engine, and got down, and he walked to the scale house door, and Hollis held it open for him, and I followed them in.
Trent stayed outside by the truck, because I had asked him to.
Randy did not shout. I think that was the first thing that surprised me.
He sat down heavily in the plastic chair beside Hollis’s desk, took off his cap, turned it over in his hands, and for a long moment he only looked at the cap.
“You went around me,” he said at last. “You went to town and you put it in front of everybody.”
“You put chains on a nineteen-year-old’s corn, Randy.”
“It was a misunderstanding.”
“It was a padlock.” I kept my voice level, and I kept my hands folded on the counter in front of me where he could see them, because I knew that if I let them move, they would shake.
“It was two padlocks, bought new, and a chain through each hasp. That is not a misunderstanding. Somebody made a decision.”