The Logbook at the Elevator Scale

Caden was leaning out the passenger window of truck seven. He had watched his father go in and come out. He had watched Mike stop at the truck on his way back and say something up to him.

“What’d Mike say?” I asked him when I climbed into the cab.

“He said I could count his loads too, this fall,” Caden said. “He said he could use a good clerk.”

“What’d you tell him?”

“I said I’d think about it.” He grinned. “I’m expensive.”

I pulled onto the scale for the last load of wheat. Pam sent the probe down. I got my ticket, number one hundred seventy-six, and Caden made the last tally mark on a clean page of the green notebook.

I cashed the check that Monday. It cleared. I paid the electric, made the dentist appointment for Caden’s back tooth, and put the rest away for the next dry spell, because in this work there is always one.

People ask what happened with Josh. He kept up the bank payments, sold one truck to bring them down, and hired three new drivers by August. He pays every one of them right.

He called Frank the second week of July. He had gone through his books with his bookkeeper and found nothing else owed to anybody. Then he drove out to the elevator in daylight and asked for his fall hauling back.

Frank gave him half of it. “Half?” I said, when Frank told me.

“Half is plenty for a man to earn back the other half on,” Frank said.

Josh and I are not friends. I don’t think we ever will be. But he picks Caden up every other weekend and on Wednesday nights, and he has not said a word against me to that boy since.

The last time he dropped Caden off, he stood in my yard a minute and said he’d heard Darrel’s outfit was doing all right.

“It is,” I said.

“Good,” he said. And then, “I put new drive tires on seven. In case you ever want her back.”

I didn’t answer that. But I didn’t say no either.

Mike and the two young drivers and I all drove for Darrel that fall. He does not dock anybody for anything without showing them the paper first. I made sure to ask.

The first morning of fall harvest, I climbed into Darrel’s truck, a blue one with a tired heater and a seat spring that pokes you in the left leg.

I turned the key, and the logbook screen asked me if I wanted it on or exempt.

I pushed on.

The radio came on a minute later. It was Mike. “Morning, seven,” he said, even though I was in truck three now, and he knew it.

“Morning, four,” I said.

Caden rode with me some Saturdays when the milo came in. He had a new spiral notebook, a red one this time, and he set it on the dash every morning without saying a word about it.

In October we hauled the last of the milo off a field west of town, red grain shining in the trailer like new pennies. I drove it in myself, the long way.

The line was short. It was a bright fall afternoon, and the elevator stood white against the sky.

Pam was in the window, and Frank was in the scale house doorway in his tan cap and his glasses, reading a ticket.

I pulled onto the scale, and Frank waved me through without looking up.