The Man Who Gave Me His Kidney

I sent it to Brenda, and she sent it on to whoever he was, and I never heard a word back.

Years went by. I got strong. I got my color back and then some. I took my anti-rejection pills every morning and every night, the way you take them for the rest of your life, and I went back to the Skillet full time, and then I took a bookkeeping course at the community college because I wanted more, and I started doing the books for a couple of the farms and the co-op, sitting at kitchen tables with my calculator while the coffee percolated. I was twenty-seven and I was well and I was so grateful for every ordinary morning that I think I annoyed people with it.

That is the year I met Eli Hartman.

He had a welding shop out on the county road between Prewitt and Deever, a pole building with a gravel lot, and he did repair work for every farmer in three townships, fixing cracked grain augers and busted hitches and the thousand things that break on a farm. The co-op sent me out to him to straighten out his books, which were a shoebox of receipts and a checkbook he had given up balancing around the time his father passed.

I will tell you my first impression of Eli, because it was wrong, and I like to be fair to him. I thought he was unfriendly. He was a big man, quiet, with hands scarred up from forty years of hot metal, and he barely looked at me when I came in, and he answered my questions about his receipts in about four words apiece. I figured him for one of those bachelor farmers who had gotten so used to his own company that other people were a kind of weather he endured.

But I kept going out there, because his books were a disaster and it took weeks, and the quiet started to feel like something else. He was not unfriendly. He was shy, the deep kind of shy that a loud world does not have much patience for. And once I stopped waiting for him to carry the conversation and just talked at him while I worked, about the Skillet and my mother and the price of corn, he started to open, slow, like a door that has not been used in a long time.

He made me coffee. He made it badly, boiled and bitter, and I drank every cup and told him it was good, and one afternoon in the second week I caught him almost smiling into his own cup because we both knew it was a lie, and that was the moment, if you want to know, that was the moment I started to love Eli Hartman.