The Lunch Pail Full of IOUs

“Nobody has seen it but me,” I said. “Jim doesn’t even know the figure.”

“You could have read it out next Saturday. In front of the whole county.”

“Dad wouldn’t have.”

He put the heel of his hand against one eye and then the other.

“I don’t have twenty-five hundred dollars,” he said. “The bank money went on the truck Monday. Three payments, twenty-three forty. I have seven hundred and sixty dollars of it left to my name.”

“Dale. Read what’s written across it.”

He looked. Paid. The date. Harold.

“That’s your writing.”

“It’s his word. I only held the marker.”

He folded the slip along its old creases, very carefully, and put it in his shirt pocket and buttoned the flap over it.

“What do I do?” he said. It was the same thing Mrs. Novak had asked me.

“I’m not going to tell you. You’re the oldest.”

He almost laughed. Then he reached down and laid his hand flat on the lid of the pail, right on the dent, and kept it there.

“I remember the day he got this crease,” he said. “I was nine. He came home and set it on the table, and Mom looked at it and went white. He said, ‘It’s the pail’s problem, not mine.'”

“I was five. I don’t remember it.”

“I do,” Dale said.

We sat there until Karen came to the door to see who he was talking to.

The shop had to be empty by the first of November. Dad had rented that building for forty years on a handshake, and the owners had a tenant waiting.

The plan from the kitchen table still stood, because it was Dad’s and it was fair. Sell the tools, split it three ways. Jeff, who calls the consignment sales in Salina and whose stock trailer Dad had rebuilt twice, said he would cry the sale for nothing. I expected a dozen men looking for cheap clamps.

I got to the shop at seven that Saturday morning and could not get into the lot.

There were trucks down both sides of the road. I counted later, because I am a bookkeeper and cannot help it. Forty neighbors, twenty-six pickups, four flatbed trailers, and Vernon Kessler’s gooseneck backed up square to the big door.

The Methodist women had a folding table up with two coffee urns and a roaster pan of cinnamon rolls. Mrs. Novak sat behind it in a lawn chair with a blanket over her knees, handing out napkins. Nobody had asked her to come and I still do not know who drove her.

Kyle Schmidt was there. So was the tire man from Holyrood.

And Dale was there. He had been there since five. He had the scrap iron sorted into three piles by the door already, and he was up on a ladder taking the tools down off that pegboard with the red outlines, one at a time, and laying each one on the bench as carefully as silverware.

Rick came at eight. He parked a long way down and walked up slow. Nobody was rude to him. I want that understood. Nobody said one hard word. Vernon nodded to him. The women poured him a coffee. But men he had known his whole life found something to look at when he came near, a tailgate, a tape measure, and the talk dropped off in front of him and picked up again behind. In a town of three thousand, that is as loud as it gets.