The Green Ledger And My Eighty Acres

Gene and Carol Ann moved across the aisle at church. Four pews up, on the other side. He nodded to me in the narthex and that was all.

Don still delivered his diesel. I asked him how that was.

“He reads the meter with me like always and signs the ticket,” Don said. “He is not being ugly, Marlys. He just flat cannot believe it. He is waiting for you to call.”

We did not have Christmas together. It was the first time since I was born. I made Mother’s oyster stew for two people and there was so much left over I gave it to the dog.

It was the second week of January when I got the ledger down.

I had been lying awake. I kept hearing Roger. A sister ought to know what she owes. And under that, a worse voice, my own, saying, your father asked you one thing at the end of his life and you have gone and undone it.

I had brought the green ledger home from the funeral in a grocery sack, twenty-six years before. Gene had not wanted it. He said he had his own books. I put it on the top shelf of the hall closet, behind the Christmas tablecloths, and I never once opened it. I could not stand to see his handwriting. That is the whole reason. Some people cannot keep a voice on an answering machine. I could not look at my father’s sevens.

That night I stood on a kitchen chair in my robe and brought it down.

The cover was worn pale at the corners where his thumbs went. It smelled like the top drawer of his desk, pipe tobacco and pencil shavings.

I sat at the table and turned to 2000.

His hand was shaky that last year but it was his. Seed. Fuel. The vet. The undertaker in town, paid ahead, which I had not known and which was just like him.

And in March, on a line by itself, in the pencil he always used:

Marlys 80, $50 to Gene till he is on his feet. Square it with her after.

I read it four times.

Till he is on his feet.

Square it with her after.

Dad had not asked me to give my brother a low rent for the rest of my life. He had asked me to carry Gene for a while. And he had asked Gene, in the same breath, in a book he knew his son would inherit, to make it right when he could.

Gene had been on his feet for twenty years. He had paid off the machinery note before his boys were out of grade school. He had bought the Peterson quarter in 2009. He traded combines every four years.

And Gene had never taken the ledger home. I thought about that a long time. I do not believe my brother ever read that line. I believe he remembered the first half of what Dad said at that table and let the second half go, the way any of us will let go of a thing that costs us.

Don came out in his undershirt and found me there. I turned the book around and he read it, moving his lips.

“Well,” he said. “There is your father.”

“I am not going to wave this at him, Don.”

“I know you are not.”

“If I walk in there and slap this down, he will fight the book. He will say Dad was sick, Dad did not know what ground would do. He has to read it by himself.”

Don sat down across from me. He reached over and shut off the light above the stove so it was only the lamp.

“Then let him read it by himself,” he said.