The Green Ledger And My Eighty Acres

The Kitchen Table

I took it out the next Saturday. I picked a day I knew there was a farm sale over by the river, because Gene has never missed a farm sale in his life.

Carol Ann opened the back door with flour on her hands.

“He is not here.”

“I know. I came to bring something back that belongs in this house.”

She looked at the sack. She let me in.

I did not make a speech. I set the ledger on the oak table, at Dad’s place, and I opened it to March of 2000, and I laid the ribbon marker across the page so it would stay.

Carol Ann wiped her hands on her apron and bent over it. I watched her read. She has known my brother since she was sixteen years old.

She read it and she straightened up and she put her hand flat against her chest.

“Oh, Gene,” she said, to nobody.

“I have not come to ask for anything,” I said. “The eighty is rented and it will stay rented. I only think he ought to know what Dad wrote. I would not want him to hear it from me in an argument.”

“Marlys.” Her eyes were wet. “I told him. That Sunday, after you left. I told him fifty dollars was a shame and a disgrace and he knew it. He slept in his chair that night.”

“You do not have to be in the middle of this.”

“I have been in the middle of it for twenty years,” she said. “I balance the checkbook, same as you.”

I went home. I left the book where it was.

Nothing happened. I want to be truthful about that. I did not get a phone call that night, or that week, or that month. February came and went. Gene baled his stalks off my eighty and hauled the last of them on the twenty-sixth, two days ahead of the end, and left the field as clean as a swept floor.

On the first of March there was no envelope from my brother in the mailbox for the first time in twenty-six years.

There was a knock on the door instead. It was Tyler and Hannah, both of them, on the step in their good coats, like they were coming to a wedding.

Hannah handed me the check with two hands.

Nineteen thousand two hundred dollars and no cents.

I put it on the refrigerator under the magnet from the bank. I know you are supposed to take a check to town. I left it there a week. I would walk past with the laundry basket and stop and look at it. Don caught me at it twice and did not say one word, which is why I married him.

Dale started on the roof the last week of March.