The Hen Who Ran the Elevator Scale
A speckled hen rode my wheat truck to the Enid elevator and somehow got herself weighed in as a bushel of hard red winter.
Every June the whole county lines up at the elevator in Enid with trucks full of hard red winter wheat, and every June I stand in that line for three hours reading the back of a seed catalog I already know by heart. The year I am telling you about, I did not know I had a passenger. A speckled hen named Loretta, who had never shown any interest in leaving the yard, had climbed into the truck bed that morning and buried herself in the grain like a woman at the beach. Harvest ran a week ahead of what the crop calendar promised, so the line was longer than usual.
I pulled onto the scale, the scale man leaned out of his little window, and he stared at the ticket printer for a good while. He said the test weight was coming up funny. I said wheat is wheat. He said wheat does not usually blink. I got out, walked around the back, and there was Loretta sitting on top of eleven hundred bushels with an expression of total professional calm, as if she had been hired to supervise.
Now the elevator manager was a careful man and did not want a hen on his official record, but the scale had already printed the ticket, and the ticket had already been stapled to a form, and a form in this county is a sacred thing. He asked if I wanted to dock the load for one chicken. I said I would take whatever the book said a chicken was worth. He went and looked in the book. There is no chicken line in the book. We stood there in the heat while a line of trucks honked behind us like a very bad band.
We settled it the only way two grown men can. We weighed Loretta separately on the little platform scale used for sacks of seed, wrote down four pounds and two ounces, and subtracted it from the load with a pen. The manager initialed it. Loretta pecked the initials. I drove home with a hen on the passenger seat and a ticket that, to this day, hangs framed in my shop with the note chicken adjustment on it. I have been told by the folks at farm.FM that I should have claimed her as a dependent, but she does not do her own paperwork.