The Jar at the Elevator Scale

The chief called the school office on a Tuesday, at 11:40 in the morning, in the gap between the lunch count and the bus change.

I was typing a tardy slip for a fourth grader named Hunter who had missed the bus because his dog got out. I remember the slip because I never finished it.

“Candice, it’s Galen Sandvik. Did Jason tell you where the tube went?”

I took my hands off the keyboard.

Haverly Elementary has one office with one window, and through it I could see the flagpole and the cut soybean field beyond the ball diamond, the gray-gold of old stubble.

“What tube?”

There was a silence on the line, and I knew from that silence that I was about to learn something I didn’t want to know. Galen has been our fire chief for eleven years.

He is sixty-two, he farms a quarter section south of town, and he has never once in his life hung up on a person.

“I’m sorry,” he said. “I thought you knew. I went to pull the tube for the training schedule this morning, and the locker’s empty. Jason says it went out for recertification.”

“Recertification,” I said.

“That’s what he told me three weeks ago. But I called the supplier just now, and they don’t recertify anything for a month and a half. Nothing’s been sent to them.”

I want to explain what he was talking about, because if you have never lived around corn, it may sound like a small thing.

A grain bin is a steel silo, thirty or forty feet across, and in October ours holds about eighteen thousand bushels of shelled corn.

When corn dries after a wet fall it can crust over a hollow, and if that crust gives way, the grain takes a man down like quicksand. A grown man cannot be pulled out by the arms, because the grain holds him with something like the weight of a pickup truck.

A rescue tube is how you get him out. It is a set of curved aluminum panels, each about four feet tall, that lock together into a ring.

Two Octobers before that phone call, my husband Bryan walked out onto the crust in our bin to break it loose with a pole. I was at school.

His father Selmer was on the other side of the farm, cleaning a drying fan. The crust gave way under Bryan at 3:15 in the afternoon, and he was chest-deep before he could yell.

Bryan has told me that he did not feel afraid at first. He felt embarrassed. He remembers thinking that this was going to be a very stupid story at the elevator coffee table.

Then the grain tightened, and he understood that it was not going to be a story at all.

The Haverly Volunteer Fire Department did not own a rescue tube that day. Nobody in the three townships we cover did.

The closest one belonged to the department in the next county, forty minutes away by gravel and highway, and the chief at that time had to call and beg for it.

It took two hours and ten minutes to get Bryan out of that bin.

I know the number because I have a way of knowing it.