The Slap At The Reunion

So when Sherry stood in that backyard and said I had just signed some papers and bought myself a family, she was not wrong about the papers. She was only wrong about everything else.

Now. The farm.

My brother Wade is a kind man and not a strong one, and I say that with love. He has always needed somebody steering a little, and after Daddy passed the steering fell to me, because that is what older sisters are for. Wade married Sherry when he was thirty. She was from over in Crossville, pretty and quick and sure of herself in a way that our family mistook for class. Mama never warmed to her. Mama said once, drying a dish, that Sherry had the kind of smile that takes inventory. I told Mama to be nice. I spent a lot of years telling people to be nice about Sherry.

Sherry made it known, over the years, in a hundred small ways, that she considered me less. I was the widow. I was the one who could not have babies. I did taxes in my front room while she had a husband and two healthy boys and a farmhouse with a wraparound porch. She would say things at Christmas like, “Well, Dana, you’ve got so much free time, being on your own,” and ask me to stay late and do the dishes while she sat with the company. I did the dishes. I told myself it cost me nothing to let her feel big.

Then three years ago Wade flipped a tractor on the slope above the creek.

He lived. Thank God, he lived. But he crushed two vertebrae and tore up his shoulder, and he was eleven months out of the field, flat on his back half of it, and then another year of not being able to lift a square bale. A hay farm does not wait for your spine to heal. The hay still has to be cut and raked and baled and sold, and the note at the bank still comes due on the first, and the cattle still have to eat whether or not the man who feeds them can stand up straight.

I found out how bad it was by accident. I do the books for a lot of folks in this town, and one of them is Earl Satterfield’s hardware and feed store out on the highway. And I was reconciling Earl’s accounts one evening and I saw that Wade’s farm account was ninety days past due on the feed, and climbing, and Earl had written in his own hand at the bottom, “Carry him. Good family.” That is the kind of town it is. But a feed store cannot carry a man forever, and I knew that, and I knew Wade would sooner die in that field than tell me he was drowning.

So I went and saw Donna Pike at Sparta Federal.