The Grain Elevator Kept A Record Nobody Wanted

The weighbridge at the elevator is dumb and honest. Truck rolls on, it prints a ticket, and the ticket goes in a folder that nobody reads until the co-op audit in February.

In February, the auditor found my truck weighed in twice on the night of 9 August, four minutes apart, identical to the kilogram. Same load, same driver code, two tickets. She asked me, politely, whether I had been running a fiddle.

Here is what I remember about 9 August. I remember the queue. I remember losing the radio to static about eight miles out, which happens in a storm and there was no storm. I remember reaching the elevator, and then I remember reaching the elevator, and I want you to understand that I do not mean I remember arriving twice. I mean the memory has a seam in it, like a video that has been cut and taped and the tape shows.

Between the two tickets there is nothing at all. Not blackness. Nothing. Ask me what I did between 22:41 and 22:45 and the question does not land anywhere.

The other drivers that night are a farming family and a hired man from three counties over. The hired man quit two weeks later. The family said the night was normal.

My wife says I have described the seam to her once before, years back, after a hunting trip, and I have no memory of that conversation either, which is the most frightening sentence in this whole account.

I have kept both tickets. They are in the folder with the tax book. Identical weights. Two stamps. One of the stamps has a smear on the ink where the roller is worn — and the smear is on both. The auditor said that was odd, then decided it was not her problem, and put a note in the file: DUPLICATE, IGNORED.

I would like somebody to tell me why the machine printed the same load twice, four minutes apart, for a truck that can only be in one place, and why for those four minutes I was — as far as I can tell, honestly, with my hand flat on the table — nowhere.

I am not claiming anything. I am telling you what the machine wrote down.