The Corn Behind the Padlocked Bins

The line was the same line. It always is. Trucks from the north, trucks from the south, a couple of Rasmussen boys on a semi, Orville Jansen with a trailer behind his pickup.

Trent pulled onto the scale. Hollis leaned out the window of the scale house and gave him a thumbs-up. I rode in the passenger seat and watched my son’s hands on the wheel.

He had set his seed cap straight, the way our father used to set his, and I did not say a word, because I could not.

Hollis’s voice came over the little speaker. “Gross, 38,260. Tare, 17,520. Net, 20,740 pounds. Moisture, 14.8. Test weight 57.” He leaned out.

“Trent, you bring that other nine loads over, and I’ll write a check for the whole thing when you’re done. Cash price this morning is three ninety-one.”

“Yes, sir,” Trent said. His voice wobbled. He cleared his throat and said it again. “Yes, sir.”

At about ten o’clock, on the sixth load, Orville Jansen got down out of his truck, walked over to Trent’s window, and put out his hand. He is eighty years old.

He has farmed north of town since the year he got out of the Army. He has seen, I think, every kind of year and every kind of man.

“Your granddad would have liked that,” he said.

Trent took the hand. He did not say anything. He could not.

Randy was there that morning. I want to say that, because it would be easy to leave him out of the end. He was parked at the far edge of the gravel lot, in his pickup, with the window down.

He had hauled his own nine hundred bushels in again, because Hollis had told him on Monday that his account was clear to deliver once the boy’s corn was out of the bins, and Hollis is a man who keeps his word in both directions.

Nobody spoke to him. There was no meanness in it. They just said nothing, and for a man who had always laughed loudest in that lot, the quiet was louder than any scolding.

It cost him. I will not pretend it did not. He lost a day and a half of hauling at the busiest hour of the season.

When he asked the co-op about an extension on his fall input account, Hollis told him, kindly, that the board would have to look at it, and that the board would be thinking about this week when they did.

He told Hollis he would meet the Kuhn payment on the fifteenth of November by selling a piece of equipment he had been keeping, a combine header, at a loss. He had no one to help him with it.

After the last load, Hollis cut the check himself.

Sixteen thousand and thirty-one dollars. That was what the numbers came to when you multiplied them out, four thousand one hundred bushels by three ninety-one, with a few cents of difference. Trent took the check and looked at it.

He looked at it for a good while. His mouth moved, but nothing came out.

“That’s yours, son,” Hollis said. “Every bit of it.”

Then my boy did something I did not expect.