The Mortgage Receipts Beside the Gravy Boat
From the first Sunday Brian brought me out there, I was the girl from town.
“Katie can set the table,” she would say. “She can manage that.”
“Don’t let her near the gravy, Brian, she’ll scorch it.”
Never to me. About me, in front of me, the way you would talk about a hired girl who had not worked out but could not be let go until after harvest.
Words, always. In four years she had never once laid a hand on me. That Sunday was the first time, and I knew before the sting faded that it would be the last.
I cleared. I washed. I dried and put away and was told I had put it away wrong. I drove out there every Sunday after church, twelve miles of blacktop and two of gravel, and I took it, because Brian would squeeze my knee under the table and say on the way home, “That’s just Mom. She doesn’t mean anything by it.”
And because of Gene.
Gene was seventy. He had farmed that ground since he was seventeen, corn and beans and a few cows, and he was the quietest man I have ever known. He had gray hair he cut himself and a closet of plaid shirts, and he said grace in eleven words.
He was also the only person in that house who had ever asked me a question about my own life and then waited for the answer.
It was a Tuesday evening in the last week of March, two and a half years before the rolls. Brian was working late at the implement dealer, where he runs the parts counter. I was home alone when a pickup I knew pulled into our drive in town.
Gene did not come to the front door. He came around to the back, the way farm people do, and when I opened it he was standing on the step with his cap in both hands.
“Is Brian here?”
“He’s at work till seven. Come in, I’ll call him.”
“No,” he said. “No, I waited till his truck was gone.”
He would not sit until I did. Then he sat on the front two inches of the chair, and he turned that cap around and around by the bill, and he told me.
Two hail years. I knew about the hail, everybody in Livingston County did. The first one came through in June and laid the corn flat when it was knee high. He replanted what he could to beans and came up short. The second came the next July, after the corn had tasseled, and there was nothing to replant.
“I had insurance,” he said. “I want you to know I am not a fool. But I had cut the coverage back to save on the premium, and what it paid was a piece of an average year. It did not pay the bank.”
He had missed the annual payment on the farm note twice. The bank in town had been decent about it. They had rewritten the whole thing, the house and the home quarter together, into a monthly payment so it would not come due in one lump he could not meet.
“Sixteen hundred and forty dollars,” he said. “First of the month. And I have made three of them, Katie, and I do not have the fourth.”
“I am not asking Brian. Brian has your house to pay for, and his pay goes up and down with the season the same as mine. You are the only one in this family with a check that comes the same every two weeks.”