The Mortgage Receipts Beside the Gravy Boat
I went out on the back porch afterward. I needed air that did not smell like pot roast.
They had cut beans the week before, and the stubble ran gold right up to the fence, and the old dog came and leaned his whole weight on my shin.
Gene came out after a while. He let the screen door close easy behind him. He stood beside me with his hands in his back pockets and looked at his field.
“Is your face all right?”
“It’s all right. It was more the surprise.”
“I should have been out of my chair before her hand came down. I am an old man and I was slow. I will see that for a good while.”
“You couldn’t have known.”
“I knew how she talked to you. I knew that for four years and I let it go on, because every time I thought about stopping it I thought about what I would have to tell her to make her stop.”
He took the notebook out again. He did not write in it this time. He opened it to the very back and held it out to me.
It was a column, in pencil. Every line had a date, and after the date, the same thing.
Katie. 1,640.
Katie. 1,640.
Katie. 1,640.
Thirty-one lines. Some of the early ones had gone soft and gray from riding in a shirt pocket through two and a half years of planting and haying and harvest. The first one was dated the night he sat in my kitchen.
“I wrote it down the same hour you paid, every month,” he said. “I would get the paper from the bank and I would go out to the shed and write your name. I was afraid if I did not write it, I might get used to it. I never wanted to be a man who got used to it.”
I could not see the page anymore.
“I have carried that in my shirt every day,” he said. “Right here.” He touched the pocket over his heart with two fingers, and his voice gave out. “Now you tell me there is a grandbaby. And I have been taking it out of that child’s mouth before it was even thought of.”
“Gene. No.”
“Yes.” He was crying the way men of his age cry, with no sound and no change in his face at all, just water. “You kept a roof on my wife. She did not know to thank you, so she did the other thing. And you sat there and took it, to keep your word to me.”
I put my arms around him. He smelled like bar soap and diesel. He stood very stiff for a second, and then he put one big hand on the back of my head, the way you would hold a child’s.
“Nobody ever did a thing like that for me,” he said into my hair. “Not in seventy years.”
“Well,” I said. “Now somebody has.”
We stood there until the dog got bored and lay down on our feet.
Brian drove us home. He did not turn the radio on.
About where the gravel meets the blacktop, he pulled over and put the truck in park.
“I’m not going to ask you to forgive me tonight.”
“Good.”
“I want to say it out, though, the whole thing. So you know I know it.” He kept his hands on the wheel. “When Dad asked me for that promise, I should have told him we do this in the daylight or not at all. I should have paid half of it if I had to sell my truck. And the first Sunday after, when Mom handed you that dish towel, I should have taken it out of your hand.”