The Lunch Pail Full of IOUs

“What is all this?” Dale said.

“IOUs,” I said.

I should explain how my father did business, because my brothers had been away from it a long time and I never had.

He ran a one-man welding and repair shop on the south edge of town for forty years. If it was iron and it was broke, it came to Harold. Hitches, hay racks, stock trailers, the tongue off a grain cart.

Most people paid. He wrote up a ticket, they wrote a check, and I entered it. I had kept his books since I was thirty-three, on Sunday afternoons at that same table. The last six years, after his hip, I also carried him his lunch. I brought it at noon from the lumber yard where I work, in a plain paper sack, because the pail had its other job by then.

Some years were bad. Hail in ’96. The drought in 2012 that burned the milo down to nothing. Winters when calf prices would not pay for the feed. In those years a man would stand in the shop door with his cap in his hands and say, “Harold, I can’t settle up till fall.”

Dad would say, “Then settle up in fall.”

And the man, because he had his pride, would look around for something to write on. He would write out what he owed and sign it and hold it out. Dad never wrote one himself. Not once. Every slip in that pail was in the hand of the person who owed it.

Dad would take it, nod, drop it in the lunch pail and shut the lid.

Fall would come and go. He never said a word about it.

I asked him once why he would not let me enter them.

“Those aren’t receivables, Lynn,” he said. “Those are neighbors.”

“Then why keep them at all?”

“Because a man needs to have signed for it,” he said. “If I throw his paper away in front of him, I’m telling him his word isn’t worth keeping. So I keep it. It doesn’t cost me anything to keep.”

That was thirty years of slips. I had seen that pail every working day of my life. I had never once added it up.

Rick did.

He dumped the pail out on the oilcloth, which I did not care for, and started unfolding. He wrote the figures down the back of the envelope the funeral home had sent the programs in.

“Forty dollars. Hitch weld, 1997.” He snorted. “Three hundred fifty, a baler, ’04. Sixty dollars, a stove door. Two seventy-five, a gate. Here’s one for twelve hundred, Lynn. Twelve hundred dollars. Did you know about this?”

“I knew.”

“Eighteen hundred. Vernon Kessler. Vernon Kessler farms three sections.”

“He was about to lose two of them in 2012,” I said.

Dale had stopped laughing.

It took Rick twenty minutes. He added it twice, the way Dad taught all three of us.

“Forty-one slips,” he said. “Nineteen thousand three hundred and forty dollars.”

Nobody said anything. The refrigerator kicked on.

“That’s three times what was in the bank,” Rick said. His voice had gone rough. “That’s his whole life sitting in a lunch bucket, and he let it lie there. He worked himself crooked for these people. He had a hip put in at seventy-five and he was back under a trailer in eight weeks. And the whole time they owed him nineteen thousand dollars.”