The Corn Behind the Padlocked Bins

He looked down at the cap. Hollis had gone to the far end of the room, very busy at the monitor, giving us as much privacy as a scale house can give.

“I’m behind,” Randy said. His voice was low and rough. “On the Kuhn quarter. Fourteen thousand two hundred dollars due on the fifteenth, and I don’t have it.

I’m not going to have it unless prices turn, and they aren’t going to turn. I’ve been awake every night since September.” He pressed his thumbs into his eyes.

“I looked at that corn sitting in Dad’s bins and I thought, he’s nineteen. He’s a kid. He won’t fight.

He’ll be mad for a month and then he’ll let it go, and I’ll make it right when I get on my feet.” He let out a breath that was almost a laugh.

“I thought I’d pay him back at Christmas.”

“With what?” I said.

He did not answer.

“I understand why,” I said. “I want you to know that I do. You are scared, and you have been scared a long time, and you didn’t tell any of us, and I am sorry for my part in that. But it is still sixteen thousand dollars of his money, and you took it because you figured he was too young to stop you.”

His jaw worked. He did not look up.

“He offered you seventeen hundred in October,” I said. “Hollis tells me that is a fair price for what you did. The combining and the bins and the dryer. He was going to pay it. He still will.

That is the difference between you and him, Randy. He wanted to pay you what was fair. You wanted all of it.”

“I know,” Randy said, very quietly.

“Then open the bins.”

He closed his eyes. For a moment I thought he was going to argue. I saw our father’s stubbornness come up in his face, and then I saw it go.

“I’ll open them,” he said.

“Now,” Hollis said, from the end of the room, without turning around.

“Now,” Randy agreed.

We followed him in convoy, my car and Trent’s grandfather’s International and Randy’s pickup, back out the county road to the home place.

At the bins Randy got out of his truck, took a ring of keys from his pocket, and opened the first lock. It took him two tries. His hand was shaking.

He pulled the chain through the hasp and let it drop in the gravel, and then he walked to the second bin and did the same, and the chain made a sound when it fell that I can still hear if I let myself.

He did not look at Trent. He stood by the second bin with his hands hanging at his sides.

Trent walked past him. He did not say anything. He lifted the lid hatch on the first bin and looked down, and I watched his shoulders drop an inch.

Then he stepped back from the bin, and for the first time in two days, he looked like a boy who had been handed something instead of having it taken.

“It’s all there,” he said to me. “It’s good corn, Mom. It hasn’t gone out of condition.”

“Then let’s get it out,” I said.

Randy ran the extension cord from the shed himself and stood back. On Wednesday morning at six, the twenty-eighth of October, Trent loaded the first of eleven loads of his own corn into his grandfather’s International and drove it to the co-op in front of everybody.