The Lunch Pail Full of IOUs

“Granddad made every one of us kids do that,” he said. “One finger. He’d say, ‘That is what it looks like when a man does a thing right.’ I never knew he hadn’t paid for it.”

“He signed for it,” I said. “My dad figured that was the same.”

Jim had crouched down to look at the hinge welds. He stayed there a while. On the way home he said, “Your dad ran a prettier bead than anybody I ever saw.” Then he did not say anything else for eleven miles, and I let him be.

I got to Vernon Kessler on Tuesday.

He was waiting for me. He was standing in his yard by the fuel barrel with his arms folded, a big man of seventy in a seed cap, and before I had the truck door shut he said, “Your brother called me Saturday night.”

My stomach went cold. “Rick.”

“He wanted to know when it would be convenient to settle up eighteen hundred dollars.” He said it without any heat. “I told him I would settle with Harold’s bookkeeper, and I believed that was his sister.”

“Vernon, I’m sorry.”

“What for? I owe it.” He pulled a checkbook out of his bib pocket. The check was already made out. I could see the ink. “2012. I had four hundred acres of milo that never made a head and a banker who would not look me in the eye. Your dad didn’t lend money. Everybody knew he didn’t have any. He drove out here with eighteen one-hundred-dollar bills in that lunch pail and said, ‘Buy seed wheat.’ I wrote him that paper on the fender of his truck.” He tore the check loose. “I’d have paid him ten times over. He kept telling me to wait for a good year. Then every year he would say it wasn’t good enough yet.”

I took the slip out of the pail and held it out. He read the word across it.

“No ma’am,” he said.

“Yes sir.”

“I can afford it. I farm three sections.”

“I know what you farm.”

“Then take the check, Lynn. Give it to your brothers if you won’t have it. I hear one of them needs it.”

So the town already knew. Of course it did. Rick had made one phone call, to a man who drinks coffee at the co-op at six every morning.

“He wouldn’t take it for fourteen years,” I said. “I can’t be the one who does.”

“Then what am I supposed to do with eighteen hundred dollars I have owed since the drought?” he said at last. “It has burned a hole in this pocket for fourteen years.”

“Dad would say go find somebody who’s having a 2012.”

He was quiet a long time.

Then he took the slip. He folded the check in half and put it back in his bib. “I expect I can find one,” he said. “When’s the shop sale?”

“Saturday week.”

“I’ll bring the gooseneck.”

Rick called me Wednesday night.

“Tell me it isn’t true,” he said.

“It’s true.”

“You are giving away nineteen thousand dollars of Dad’s money.”

“I’m giving people back their own handwriting. Dad never had that money, Rick. He had the paper.”

“I’ve got Jenna’s tuition,” he said. “Fall’s paid and spring is coming. Did you think of that?”

“I think of Jenna all the time. I would help with her tuition out of my own paycheck before I would take sixty dollars off Marie Novak.”