The Receipt on the Feed Store Board

Then the passenger door opened, and the cane came out, and then a small black shoe.

I have seen my brother-in-law walk out on lake ice in March that nobody else would stand on. I watched him take one step backward from a woman who did not come up to his shirt pocket.

“Mrs. Hartmann,” he said. He took his cap off. He was fifty-one years old, and he took his cap off.

“Dale.”

She walked right into the middle of his yard. She did not hurry and she did not look at the ground. The shed door was open, and the red splitter sat just inside it. She stopped where she could see it, and then she turned so that she could see him.

“I have burned your brother’s wood for eleven winters,” she said. “I am burning it now. I had a fire this morning that his son laid for me, with oak that his widow paid you forty dollars for the privilege of splitting. I read that on a wall in town, in your own handwriting, which has not improved.”

“Mrs. Hartmann…”

“I am not finished.” She was not loud. She never once raised her voice in thirty-four years of teaching, people say, and she did not raise it then. “I have known you since you were nine years old. You were not a greedy child. You were a proud one. You would take a zero before you would ask to borrow a pencil. I sent you home with a note about it.”

Dale’s ears had gone red.

“So I do not believe you did this for forty dollars,” she said. “I think there is something you could not make yourself ask for. And I would like you to tell this girl what it is, now, while I am standing here. I am eighty-six, and I cannot stand here long.”

Nobody moved. A chickadee was going in the pines behind the shed. Dale looked at the splitter. He looked at the cap in his hands. Then he looked at me, and it was the first time he had looked straight at me since April.

“He owed me six hundred dollars,” he said.

I did not understand him at first. “Who did?”

“Jim. February.” It came out of him in pieces, like something he had to pull. “The rear end went out of his plow truck. He was laid up for hauling, the bans were coming, you two were tight. I found an axle at the salvage yard in Antigo. Six hundred. I put it on my card, and I put it in for him over two nights. I didn’t charge him the labor. I wouldn’t have.”

“He never told me,” I said.

“He wouldn’t have. He said, ‘Don’t say anything to Beck, she’s got enough to worry about. I’ll square it when the roads open up and I’m hauling.'” Dale turned the cap around in his hands. “The roads opened the twenty-second of April.”

Jim died on the ninth.

“And then I didn’t know how,” Dale said. “I’m not good at it. I had the card bill coming every month. I’d think, I’ll go up there and tell her. And then I’d think about walking into that kitchen and asking a widow for six hundred dollars at the table where he…” He stopped. “I couldn’t. I took the splitter that week because I thought, well, I’ll hold it, and when she asks for it I’ll say it then. And you asked. And I had it all ready to say, and what came out of my mouth was forty dollars an afternoon.”