The Mortgage Receipts Beside the Gravy Boat
It was not a good speech. It was late, and it was clumsy, and he was standing in a puddle of tea.
It was the first time in four years he had been standing on my side of the table, and I would not trade it for a better one.
He looked down at me then. He could barely do it.
“Katie, I’m sorry. I don’t know what else to say that’s big enough.”
“That’ll do for a start,” I said.
Lorraine got up. She did not say a word. She went through the swinging door into the kitchen, and we heard the water come on, and then we heard it run and run with nothing being washed.
Nobody followed her. Gene started to rise and Dot put two fingers on his sleeve.
“Leave her be a minute,” Dot said. “She has to get it down before she can bring anything back up.”
Gene turned to me.
“You brought these today,” he said. “You had them with you. You were coming to tell me something.”
So I told him. All three of them, there at the wrecked table, with the tea dripping off the edge onto the linoleum.
“I can pay it through December, Gene. I can’t go past that. I’m sorry.”
“You have nothing on this earth to be sorry for.”
“I’m expecting,” I said. “End of April.”
Brian made a sound I had never heard him make. He sat down hard in his chair and took hold of my hand in both of his and put his forehead down on my knuckles.
Aunt Dot said, “Well, thank the Lord for some good news at this table,” and blew her nose.
Gene did not say anything at all for a moment. He was looking at the stack of paper.
Then he reached into his shirt pocket and took out the seed company notebook and the pencil stub. He tore a clean page from the front, laid it on the cloth, and wrote on it in his square farmer’s printing. He wrote slowly. He pressed hard enough that I could have read it from the back.
He turned it around and pushed it down to me.
It said: I owe my daughter-in-law Katie $50,840, and whatever she pays between now and the day I settle. I will sell the forty across the road to Dale and pay her first, before the bank and before myself. And under that he had signed his whole name, and the date.
“Gene, you don’t have to write it down. I know you’re good for it.”
“I should have written it down the first night. I wrote it in here instead, where nobody could see it.” He tapped the notebook. “That was pride. A debt you hide is not a debt, it’s a favor you are stealing a little at a time.”
“The forty was her daddy’s money.”
“The forty is dirt,” Gene said. “I should have sold it two years ago and I let a girl carry me instead, so my wife would not have to know I had failed her. I am through with that.”
Dot took the pencil out of his hand, and under his name she wrote: Seen by me. And signed hers.
“Somebody at this table ought to witness it,” she said. “I witnessed the other.”
I folded the page in half and put it in my purse, where the stack had been.
So the secret was over, and so was the free ride. October, November and December would go on that page too.