The Lunch Pail Full of IOUs

“That sounds like him.”

“I did not have sixty dollars, Lynn. I had Edwin’s funeral to pay. So I wrote that.” She took a breath. “Then the calves sold bad. The next year I was ashamed it had gone a year. Do you know I took him that sixty dollars four different times? In an envelope. Right to the shop.”

I had not known that.

“Four times. And every time he would lift the lid on that pail and poke around in it and say, ‘Marie, I can’t find any slip on you. I can’t take money without a slip. It would foul up Lynn’s books.'” She laughed, and the laugh broke in the middle. “He sent me home with my own envelope. The last time he set a sack of his tomatoes on top of it.”

Then she saw the word written across the paper, and the date, and his name.

She cried the way women her age cry, without any noise at all, with her hand flat on the slip. I got up and came around the table and held on to her. She weighed nothing. She smelled of wood smoke and hand lotion.

“Eighteen years,” she said into my shoulder. “He had it the whole time. He knew right where it was.”

“He knew right where every one of them was.”

“What do I do with it now?”

“Whatever you want. It’s yours. It always was.”

She folded it in half and put it in her Bible, in the Psalms, and shut the cover on it.

I sat in the truck at the end of her lane for ten minutes before I could see to drive.

That was how the week went.

One slip belonged to a man who died in 2019. I took it to his son, who runs the tire shop in Holyrood, and he read it standing in the bay with an impact wrench in his other hand. Twelve hundred dollars, the year of the hail. He set the wrench down on a tire.

“Dad never told us,” he said. “He about lost the place that year. We never did know how he made the note.” He looked at me. “It was your dad.”

Jim took me to the far ones. He would pull in at three-thirty smelling of propane, with his hands cracked from the cold fittings, change his shirt, and we would go in his pickup with the pail on the seat between us. At every place he stayed with the truck unless he was asked in, and he was nearly always asked in, because he has filled those people’s tanks for twenty years and has never once let a widow run out over a weekend.

North of the interstate, on the Schmidt place, a young man named Kyle came out of the machine shed wiping his hands on a rag. The slip was his grandfather’s. Two hundred seventy-five dollars, 1998, for a corral gate.

He read it twice. Then he said, “Come look.”

He walked us out past the barn. The gate was twelve feet of two-inch pipe hung on a post rock corner post, with the family’s brand cut out of quarter-inch plate and set in the middle. Twenty-eight Kansas winters had gone over it. Kyle put one finger on the free end and pushed, and it swung all the way open and stopped without a sound.