The Moisture Reading Everyone Saw

Alden also did what he said. He ran the books back to September first, and found eleven more tickets that had been padded, belonging to Alma Rudd and the Ostby brothers and two other older men who had never said anything. Every one of them got a check. Alma’s was for nineteen hundred dollars. Her grandson told me she cried and then put it in the church offering plate.

My Aunt Lorraine called my father that night. I was in the kitchen when the phone rang. Dad listened for a long time with the receiver against his ear, and he said “I know” twice, and “I know that, Lorraine,” and then, very gently, “Not tonight. I will call you Sunday.”

He hung up and sat in Mom’s chair. Then he got up and put the kettle on.

There was no reunion, and I am not going to pretend there was. I do not know what Brent said to his mother. I know she did not come to Sunday dinner, and I know Dad sent her a card.

The next Saturday I drove to the elevator with the green thermos in the truck cab. It was full of coffee, the way Mom always filled it, strong and black with a spoonful of sugar. The line was longer than usual.

Eight trucks stood in front of us. And I noticed, when I got closer, that at least five of the drivers had something in their hands. Little gray machines, the kind Conrad Torgerson keeps in his shop. Marcy had put out a notice at the extension office. She and Pete had lent out six of them that week.

Teresa was not in the scale house yet, so Alden himself stood at the window. He had set a folding chair out on the gravel, with a cushion on the seat.

“For Lars,” he said, and pointed.

Dad sat in it. He poured a cup from the green thermos and held it in both hands. I could see his breath, and I could see the steam from the cup, and I could see the hands of every man in that line moving in the same small ritual, scoop and pour and press and read.

Kenny Rask was the first through. He leaned out the window and said, “Fifteen point four. Alden, put that on the ticket.”

Alden wrote it down.

Dad’s load went in right behind. The probe hissed, and the sample came out. Alden ran it on the elevator’s meter with the screen turned to face the lot, so that anybody who cared to look could see.

I stood at the tailgate and watched the numbers come up. They did not look like anything. They looked like what they were.

Fifteen point one.

Dad did not say anything. He took the ticket from Alden and read it, the full ticket, front and back, with his glasses on. He folded it once. He tucked it in his shirt pocket, right behind the pen that has been there since before I was born.

Then he looked up at me over the rim of the thermos cup, and he did something he had not done all fall. He winked.

Not a word. Just the wink, and a nod, and a sip of Mom’s coffee in the cold bright October air.

I drove the truck home.