The Wheat Crop Held at the Elevator

“What is this?” I said to Sid. “You tell me,” Sid said. He did not smile. “They came on their own.”

A few minutes later Wayne’s pickup turned in from the highway. It came slowly across the gravel, past the pump island and the scale, and every head in the lot turned to follow it.

Wayne parked at the end of the row and sat there with both hands on the wheel.

I could see him through the windshield. I watched his lips move. Then he got out.

He was wearing his good shirt, the pearl-snap one, and a pair of clean jeans. He did not have the file folder.

He stood by his truck for a moment, taking in the lot, the trucks, the faces. Nobody spoke. A man at the far end of the row set his coffee down on a tailgate.

I understood then what a place like Lyle is. It is a town of four hundred people where nobody locks the cafe and everybody knows what you owe on your combine.

It is a place where a man’s word is a currency.

In my uncle’s whole life he had never once been on the wrong end of it, because he had never once tested it.

Wayne walked the length of the lot. I watched Mr. Kroeker look down at his boots. Wayne walked up the three steps of the scale house and stopped at the door where I stood.

“Where’s Sid,” he said. “Inside.” “Move, Nolan.” I stepped aside. He went in. I went in behind him, and so did Leland Faber and Mr. Kroeker and four others, until the little office was full. Lorna looked up from her window. Sid sat at his desk with his glasses in his hand.

Wayne reached into his shirt pocket. “Eighteen thousand,” he said. His voice was hoarse and flat. “That’s the number. I want to know it’s right before I write it.”

“It’s right,” I said. “Twenty an acre. Nine hundred acres. I’ll show you the acreage from the monitor on the S780 if you like. It’s in the cab.”

“I don’t need to see it.” “Then write it out.” He took a checkbook from his back pocket.

It was a long one, the kind the bank gives a farmer, a spiral binder with a cover the color of old leather. He opened it on Sid’s desk and uncapped a pen. His hand shook just a little.

I think it was the shaking that made the room quiet. Nobody in that office wanted to hurt him. Everybody wanted him to finish.

He wrote the date. He wrote my name, the whole name, Nolan Emil Reimer, and I remembered that he had stood up at my christening.

He wrote the number in the box, and then he wrote it out in words, slowly, as though he had never done it before. Eighteen thousand and no hundredths.

He signed. He tore the check along the perforation and held it out. I did not take it right away. “There’s one more thing,” I said.

Wayne’s eyes came up. For a second I thought he would hit me. He was a big man once. “Cade,” I said.

I had told my son to wait in the truck. He had not. He was standing in the doorway behind a farmer’s elbow with his hands jammed in his back pockets. “Come here, buddy.”