The Receipt on the Feed Store Board

We took the pie. Those were the rules.

That left one cord for my own stove out of the four, and thirteen or fourteen more still lying in rounds along my fence.

Sunday night I sat at the kitchen table, at Jim’s place, with Dale’s receipt flattened out in front of me and an index card from the recipe drawer. I wrote four different notes and threw away three.

I am not a spiteful woman. I want that to be true, so I am careful about it. I did not write one word about Dale on that card. What I wrote was this:

Free split oak for any widow or shut-in on Otter Creek Road who needs it before snow. Split Saturday on Jim Thorson’s splitter. Call Becky Thorson.

And my telephone number. Every word on it was true, and there was nothing on it I would have minded reading out loud in church.

Monday morning I was at the feed store at seven, when Ray unlocked. I had a route to start by seven-thirty, so I was already in my co-op jacket.

Everybody up here knows that board. It is by the front counter, next to the coffee pot, and it is where you find out who has hay and who lost a beagle. I took two thumbtacks out of the corner. I pinned up my index card.

Then I pinned Dale’s receipt next to it. Just the receipt, on its parts-store paper, with nothing written on it but what he wrote.

Ray was counting his drawer. He looked up when he heard the tacks go in. He came around the counter and stood beside me with his reading glasses pushed up on his forehead, and then he pulled them down.

He read the card. He read the receipt. He read the card again.

“Jim’s splitter,” he said.

“Yes.”

He looked at the receipt a long time. He did not ask me a single question. He took off his glasses and folded them.

“You want coffee, Becky?”

“I’ve got a route,” I said. “Thank you, Ray.”

I went to work.

I did not say another word about it to anybody. I pinned up two pieces of paper and drove a propane truck.

But you cannot fill a tank in this county without somebody coming out on the porch in his slippers to visit, and by Wednesday they were coming out with something particular on their minds.

A man named Larry, on Pine Road, held my hose for me, which he had never done before. He said he had a thirty-ton splitter and could have it in my yard that night, and I could keep it till Easter.

“That’s good of you, Larry. I’ve got one.”

“So I read,” he said.

It would have been the easy way out for everybody, Dale included. But the red one would have sat in that shed for ten years with Jim’s writing on it. I did not want Larry’s splitter. I wanted my husband’s.

Three other men made me the same offer that week.

The phone rang at home, too. Two calls were for the oak, both from farther out than Otter Creek Road. I wrote the names down.

Cole came home Wednesday and dropped his backpack by the door.

“Everybody at school knows,” he said. “Why don’t you say more? You could bury him, Mom. Everybody’s waiting for you to.”