The Mortgage Receipts Beside the Gravy Boat
He looked at me then. His eyes were red around the edges.
“I am seventy years old and I am sitting in my son’s wife’s kitchen with my hat in my hands. I would not be here if I had another door to knock on.”
“What about selling something?” I said. “Ground, or the cows?”
“There’s a forty across the road Dale has wanted for ten years. I could sell it tomorrow.” He shook his head. “Lorraine’s daddy gave us the money for that forty. If I sell it she’ll want to know why, and then she’ll know all of it.”
“She doesn’t know?”
“She knows we had hail. She does not know about the bank.” He turned the cap. “I have carried the mail up from the road every day for fifty years. She keeps the house account and I keep the farm books. She has never once looked in that desk.”
“Gene.”
“She came to that place with nothing and she has scrubbed it for forty-nine years. If she thought it was slipping, I do not know what it would do to her. Her pride could not bear it.” He swallowed. “I am asking you to help me, and I am asking you not to tell her. I know what kind of thing that is to ask.”
I had a savings account from before I was married. It was what I had put away over six years of living small, and it was meant to be a down payment on something someday.
“A year,” I said. “I can do a year, Gene.”
He nodded. He could not talk for a minute. Then he took a little spiral notebook out of his shirt pocket, the kind the seed company gives away, and he wrote something in the back of it with a pencil stub and put it away again.
I did not ask what.
He gave me the loan number on a slip of paper. I set the payment up through my own bank, out of my own checking account, to go on the twenty-eighth of every month so it would never be late.
One good year would have ended it. The next summer was dry instead.
That was thirty-one months before the rolls.
You will want to know about Brian. Everybody does. Why I did not tell my husband.
I did not tell him for seven months, because his father had asked me not to and because I had the money in my own name. That was wrong of me, and I knew it was wrong while I did it.
Then one night in September he was looking for the checkbook and found a statement instead.
I told him everything, standing at the kitchen counter. All of it. His father’s cap, the hail, the sixteen forty.
He sat down. He was quiet a long time.
“Mom doesn’t know,” he said finally.
“No.”
He drove out to the farm the next morning before work. He came home that night looking ten years older.
“Dad made me promise,” he said. “He stood in the machine shed and asked me, as his son, to let him be the one to tell her. He said he would do it the day he had the money to lay beside it.” He rubbed his face with both hands. “I gave him my word, Katie. Same as you did.”