The Lunch Pail Full of IOUs

He stood beside me a minute. “You did this,” he said, low.

“No,” I said. “Dad did this. It just took forty years to come due.”

Jeff climbed up on a flatbed at nine and started with the small lots. Clamps, grinders, the chop saw, the torch set, forty pounds of rod. Things went high. They went foolish high. A coffee-stained set of taps brought eighty dollars.

About the third lot I understood what they were doing, and I had to go stand behind Jim’s truck for a minute.

They were paying. I had not let one of them pay me, so they were doing it the only way left to them, one bid at a time, into a pot that would be split among all three of Harold’s children.

Jim came around and stood next to me with his hand on the back of my neck, and we listened to our neighbors overpay for my father’s clamps.

Then Jeff got to the welder.

It was the Lincoln, the big Idealarc that Dad bought used in 1984 with his last check from the mine. Every man there knew what it was worth, and at least four of them could have used it.

“Now here is the heart of the shop,” Jeff said. “Lincoln two-fifty, runs like the day it was made, and you all know whose hand was on it. Who’ll give me five hundred to start?”

I had not planned to bid on anything. I do not weld. But I heard my own voice.

“One hundred dollars.”

It was what I had in my purse.

Jeff looked at me. Then he looked out over forty people.

“I have one hundred. Do I hear two?”

Nobody moved.

A meadowlark was going on a fence post across the road, and it was the only sound there was. Men looked at their boots. Vernon Kessler, who had bid on eleven lots that morning, put both hands in his bib pockets and studied the sky.

“Folks,” Jeff said, “this is a five-hundred-dollar machine.”

It was Dale who answered him. He had come down off the ladder. He was standing next to the welder with his hand flat on top of it, the same way he had laid it on the pail.

“That one’s my sister’s, Jeff,” he said. “Knock it down.”

Jeff has called sales for thirty years and he knows when to quit talking. He said, “Sold, one hundred dollars, to Harold’s girl,” and slapped his hand on the flatbed, and then for a second or two he had to study his clipboard.

I am fifty-two years old. Nobody had called me that since I was twelve.

I promised myself I would tell where the money went, since money is where this started.

The sale brought $7,410, about twice what those tools were worth to anybody sensible. It was split three ways like the note said, $2,470 apiece.

Of the $6,200 from the bank, Dale’s $3,100 went like this. Three truck payments, $2,340, on the Monday after the funeral. The other $760 he brought me in a bank envelope the morning of the sale, before anybody else was there.

“I can’t pay him,” he said. “Tell me where he’d want it.”

I told him. Two hundred eighty-five dollars of it cut Dad’s date into the stone he already shares with Mom. The other $475 bought Mrs. Novak 250 gallons of propane in January, at $1.90 a gallon, to back up that wood stove. Jim delivered it himself. When she came out in the snow with her checkbook, he told her the ticket was marked paid and he could not find any balance on her. He says she looked at him a long moment, and then went in the house and came back with a sack of kolaches.