The Receipt on the Feed Store Board

“Fifteen afternoons,” Mrs. Hartmann said. She had always been quick at arithmetic.

“Yes, ma’am.” His voice had gone thick. “Fifteen afternoons and we’d be square, and I’d never have had to say it out loud. It sounded all right in the truck.” He looked at me. “It didn’t sound all right when you handed me the money. And then you asked for the receipt, and I thought you were just being careful. I thought it was kind of funny.”

“I know you did,” I said.

“It’s not funny on that board.”

“No.”

I stood in his yard and felt a week of being right go out of me like air out of a tire. Not all of it. A man who is owed six hundred dollars says so. He does not take a dead man’s tools and charge the widow by the day. I thought so then, and I think so now.

But I also thought of Jim at the kitchen table, not telling me, to save me the worry. And his brother down the road, not telling me, because he was ashamed to. The two of them were exactly alike. Second row, by the radiator.

“Wait here,” I said.

“Becky, I don’t…”

“Wait here, Dale.”

I left Mrs. Hartmann in his yard, where he brought her a chair from the shed. I drove the half mile home. I went into the kitchen and reached up on top of the refrigerator and took down the coffee can.

That was the wood money. Every fall Jim sold a few cords to the cabin people on the lake, ninety dollars a face cord, and every dollar of it went into a Folgers can on top of the refrigerator. I had not touched it since April. I had not been able to take the lid off.

I took the lid off on the tailgate, in Dale’s yard, with both of them watching.

There was six hundred and forty dollars in it. Twenties, mostly, soft and a little sawdusty.

I counted out six hundred onto the tailgate and squared the stack and held it out to him.

“I can’t take that,” Dale said.

“You can and you will. It isn’t mine. It’s his. It’s the wood money, and he’d have brought it down to you himself the day the roads opened, and you know it.” I kept my arm out. “Jim paid what he owed. I’m not going to have him be the one man on this road who didn’t.”

He took it. His hand was not steady. He did not put it in his shirt pocket this time. He just held it.

Then he reached into the shirt pocket with his other hand and took out two twenties, folded once. The same two. He had been carrying them around for a week.

“I never spent it,” he said. “I couldn’t make myself break them.”

I looked at them. I could have told him to keep it, that it was rent and I had a receipt. A week before I might have. I took them and put them in the coffee can, and I pressed the lid down.

“I’m sorry, Becky,” he said. “I’m sorry I took it out of your yard. I’m sorry about the forty dollars. Jim would have…” He shook his head. “I don’t know what Jim would have done.”

“He’d have called you a stubborn fool and then split your wood for you,” I said. “Hook it up for me.”