The divorce was final in March. My half of the trucking outfit came out to $38,000, and Josh had to borrow it against two of the trucks to buy me out.
He signed at the bank with his jaw so tight I could hear his teeth.
I used the money to pay off the house where Caden and I live, so that whatever happened, my son would have a roof nobody could take. That left me needing a job.
In March, in central Kansas, every outfit that hauls grain already has its drivers lined up for harvest. Josh had one seat open. Truck seven, the red one, the very first truck we ever bought.
He offered it to me himself, in the parking lot outside the courthouse, without looking at me.
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“Sixty a load through harvest,” he said. “Hourly after, same as everybody. You know the truck.”
“You sure you want that?” I asked him.
“I want the truck driven by somebody who won’t burn it up,” he said. “That’s all I want.”
I believed him. I think he believed himself, that day. It was later, when he watched that bank payment go out every month, that it turned in him into something else.
Harvest started early that year, the first week of June, after a hot dry May.
The wheat around Hutchinson came on all at once, and for nineteen days of cutting spread over twenty-four days of June, I did nothing but haul.
A harvest day starts before the combines do. I would be parked at the edge of the field by the time the dew burned off, while the custom crew greased their machines.
When the grain was dry enough, the combine made its first round.
When the grain cart was full, the driver ran it over to my trailer and unloaded with the auger, a big steady golden stream with dust coming off it like smoke.
A full trailer of hard red winter wheat is about 950 bushels, close to 57,000 pounds. You feel it.
The truck settles on its springs, and when you pull out onto the gravel road, it does not want to go anywhere fast.
Our elevator sits east of town, a tall white concrete elevator with a row of steel bins beside it. Frank Unruh has managed it for twenty-two years.
You can see the top of it from eleven miles off on a clear day.
At the elevator you pull onto the scale and stop. Pam, who runs the scale house with Frank, sends the probe down into your trailer on its long arm. While she tests the sample, the scale weighs you loaded.
Then you pull ahead to the dump pit, open the hopper gates, and let the wheat run through the grate. The leg carries it up into the elevator.
You pull back onto the scale empty for your tare weight, and Pam hands you the ticket.
Every ticket says the same things. Date, time in, time out, truck number, the farmer’s name. Gross, tare and net weight. Test weight, moisture, net bushels. The ticket is how the farmer gets paid and how the hauler bills.
That is the whole job. Field, road, scale, pit, scale, road, field. Every loaded mile has a ticket at the end of it, and every empty mile is the road back for the next load.