The Wheat Crop Held at the Elevator

There was a long silence. I heard a television somewhere behind him, a ball game, the crowd noise rising and falling.

“I can’t tell you what to do with your own signature,” Sid said. “I can tell you that rule is older than I am.

The hauler signs the transfer. Nobody else. I have held grain for a week over a dispute between brothers and for a month over a divorce.

I’m not going to move a bushel of that wheat until the man whose name is on the tickets says to.” “That’s all I’m asking.”

“Is it?” “I’m not asking you to do anything to Wayne,” I said. “I’m asking you not to do anything for him until I’m paid.”

“Then you’ll come in tomorrow morning and sign a hold slip,” Sid said. “With your own hand, in front of my girl at the window, and I’ll file it. And Nolan?”

“Yes, sir.” “Your father would’ve asked him nicer than I would’ve.” His voice cracked on the word, a little. “But he would’ve held that grain too.”

I sat in the truck for a few minutes after that.

Then I went inside and told Carla, and she started to cry and I started to laugh, and neither of us could have said why.

The next morning we did not drive to North Dakota. It cost us. I will say that plainly too, because anybody who thinks a stand like this is free has never worked a harvest.

Haugstad had a clause that said we had to be on his ground by the seventh.

I called him and told him I would be a few days late, and he said, in a flat voice, that he had other crews.

That call alone cost me close to a hundred and fifty acres of his wheat to another outfit.

Leland Faber, who runs a crew out of Weatherford and had been two fields ahead of me the whole run, drove past the co-op that afternoon and saw our trucks parked along the fence.

He stopped. He is sixty, he has cut wheat since Reagan, and he does not say anything he has not thought about.

“You’re holding,” he said. “I’m holding.” “Whose grain?” I told him. He wiped his forehead with his wrist and looked at the elevator, which stands over Lyle like a church.

“Good,” Leland said. “Somebody ought to.” He put his cap back on. “I’ll tell the road.” I did not know then what that meant. I do now.

Sid’s office window looks over the scale and the dump pit and the long gravel lot.

That Saturday morning Sid had me sign the hold slip in front of Lorna, who has worked the scale window for nineteen years and who looked at the paper and then at me, and then went back to counting the cash drawer, very quietly, the way you do when you have decided to say nothing.

“I need to call him,” Sid said. “That’s the other rule. Courtesy.” “Please.” I stood in the doorway and listened to Sid’s end. He was kind, and he did not take long.

“Wayne, it’s Sid. Nolan’s got a signature hold on the Reimer tickets. No, I can’t. No. It’s his name on them. I’d talk to him.”

Then he held the phone a little away from his ear, and I could hear Wayne from six feet off. I could not make out words. I could make out the volume.