The Logbook at the Elevator Scale

“Did I?” I asked him.

He looked down at that notebook for the longest time. A combine went past the end of the field with its header up, and the radio hissed.

“No,” he said.

Then he tore the page out along the perforations, very carefully, and folded it once and handed it to me. “You should put that with your papers,” he said. “So there’s two of us.”

I had to look out the side window for a minute.

I put that page in the folder with the rest. I have it still. It is in my top dresser drawer with his baby teeth and my mother’s wedding ring.

“Your dad’s not a bad man,” I told him, when I could talk. “He’s a man who’s mad about money. Those aren’t the same thing. Don’t let anybody tell you they are, including me.”

“I know,” Caden said. And then, because he was fifteen, “Can we get the gas station burritos after?”

The crew cut the last of it by early afternoon. It was a bright clear June day, not one cloud, the kind wheat country gives you at the end like an apology for the rain.

The stubble went gold all the way out to the edge of that big Kansas sky.

When the last of the grain cart was in my trailer, the crew boss blew his horn twice, which is how they tell the trucks the field is done.

I tarped the load and drove the eight miles to the elevator with Caden beside me. I did not hurry. The folder sat on the seat between us.

The line at the elevator was long. Every farmer was trying to get the last of it in. Semis with grain trailers waited back along the drive, with the heat shimmering off their hoods.

I could see Mike’s truck, number four, three ahead of me, and the two young drivers’ trucks in front of him. Our whole outfit was in that line, every driver Josh had talked to about me.

Josh was not there. He was out on the county road in his pickup, running the last fields and dispatching. I could hear him on the radio telling truck two to go around by the blacktop.

When the truck ahead of me pulled onto the scale, I set my brakes and left the engine idling. I picked up the folder. The papers were heavy, and I held them in both hands.

“You want me to come?” Caden asked.

“No, baby,” I said. “You stay with the truck. If the line moves, honk.”

He leaned out the passenger window and watched me go.

I walked up the line of trucks along the drive. I knew every man in those cabs. I could feel them looking. Nobody said a word.

Frank Unruh was standing in the scale house doorway in his tan cap, glasses down on his nose, reading a ticket.

He is sixty and has a face like a good corner post, square and weathered and not going anywhere.

“Shannon,” he said. “You’re not on the scale.”

“No, sir,” I said. “I need your counter for one minute.”

He looked at the folder and then at my face, and something in his face changed, just slightly. He stepped back out of the doorway and let me in.

The scale house is small. A counter runs the length of it, with the computer at one end and the ticket printer at the other, and a window looks out on the scale.