The Receipt on the Feed Store Board

I was peeling potatoes. I kept peeling.

“Because he’s your dad’s brother,” I said. “He taught your dad to drive. He stood beside me at the grave and he could not get through the Lord’s Prayer. Whatever this is, it isn’t all he is. I put up the truth, and it was a small truth, and in his own handwriting. If there’s more to it than that, I want him to be the one to tell me.”

“And if he doesn’t?”

“Then I pay forty dollars on Saturday,” I said, “and I ask for another receipt.”

He almost smiled. It was the first time in a while.

Ray told me later what happened Thursday. Dale came in for hydraulic fittings, about ten in the morning, when the counter is the fullest. Four or five men were standing there with their coffee. He said good morning. Nobody was rude. Somebody said morning, Dale. And then nobody said anything else, and one by one they looked at the board, and then at the floor. Dale turned around to see what they had been looking at.

Ray said he read it standing very still. He could have torn it off the board and no one would have stopped him, and he did not. He paid for his fittings and he left a five on the counter for a three-dollar sale and walked out without his change.

Friday night his truck came up Otter Creek Road and slowed at the end of my driveway. I saw the headlights stop on the kitchen wall. They sat there for most of a minute. Then they went on.

Saturday I worked a half day. October is when everybody remembers they have a tank. I was coming home a little after noon in my own pickup when I saw somebody walking the gravel shoulder of Otter Creek Road, very slowly, on the wrong side for traffic.

It was Mrs. Hartmann.

She had on a wool coat and a plastic rain bonnet tied under her chin, though it was not raining, and she was planting her cane ahead of her like a woman driving fence posts.

I pulled over and put the window down.

“Mrs. Hartmann. Where in the world are you going?”

“I am going to see Dale Thorson.”

“That’s another half mile.”

“I am aware of where he lives, Rebecca. I drove this road for forty years.”

“Who told you?”

“Donna Peterson drove me to town for my prescription on Thursday. I can still read a bulletin board.” She did not stop walking. I had to let the truck creep along beside her. “You may drive me, or you may follow me. I would prefer that you drive me, because I would like to have some breath left when I get there.”

I got out and helped her up into the cab. She weighed nothing. She smelled like wood smoke, and I was glad of it.

“I don’t want you fighting my fights,” I said, when I had her belted in.

“I am not fighting anything. I am going to ask a former pupil a question.” She set the cane upright between her knees and folded both hands on top of it. “I had those boys at the same desk, three years apart. Second row, by the radiator. I know them both a good deal better than you do, with respect.”

Dale was in the yard when we pulled in, with the hood up on somebody’s Ford. He saw my truck and straightened.