The Last Load

Vern stood by the grain bin and watched us load the pickup.

He didn’t come over.

He didn’t say a word.

It was dusk on a Thursday at the end of October. The sky over the stubble fields was the color of a bruise, purple fading to gray. The yard light on the pole by the machine shed had just flickered on. It hummed the way it always did, a sound I’d heard every night for ten years.

My father-in-law stood at the base of the big grain bin with his hands in the pockets of his chore coat. Sixty-seven years old. Broad and stooped. His feed cap pulled low.

He watched us the whole time.

Nate lifted another box into the bed of the pickup and kept his back to his dad.

Kitchen stuff, that box. Pots and pans. The cast iron skillet my grandmother gave me when we got married. Nate set it down carefully next to the box of towels and pushed it toward the cab so it wouldn’t slide.

He didn’t look over at the bin. Not once. But I could see his jaw working.

I came down the trailer steps with the next one.

Ten years we lived in that single-wide.

A 1994 Fleetwood, fourteen by seventy, beige with brown trim. Vern had it hauled in on a semi the spring we got married and set it on cinder blocks forty feet from the machine shed. He said it was temporary. Just till we got on our feet.

The furnace was older than our marriage. The windows sweated in winter and froze shut. The floor in the bathroom was soft by the toilet, and you learned to step around that spot. In January, you could see your breath in the back bedroom if the wind came out of the northwest.

We made it home anyway. I hung curtains. Nate built me a little deck out of scrap lumber. We put a kiddie pool out front for the dog in July.

But it was never ours. It was always Vern’s trailer on Vern’s land, forty feet from Vern’s shed.