Forty Years of Banking Across Main Street

The week the town found out

By Saturday morning the whole town knew.

I do not understand how. A town of 2,100 can keep a secret from nobody. By the time I walked into the Corner Cafe at eight, Nita Burdick took one look at me and set down the pot.

“Is it true? He turned down Dot for a furnace?”

“Nita, I’d rather not.”

I did not say more. Nita topped off my cup. The whole cafe had gone quiet.

“Well,” Nita said, in a voice she meant to carry, “I’ve banked at Cass County since I opened this place. Eleven years. I think I’ll go see what a green awning looks like.”

It was not a boycott. Nobody organized anything. Nobody printed a flyer. It was smaller than that, and much worse for Craig. One person after another did the quiet arithmetic a person does at a kitchen table, and decided that if a bank would treat Dorothy Ellison that way, they were not sure what it would do to them. The Women’s Circle moved its account first. The Lions Club went next, and the treasurer, a retired gym teacher named Elwin, told Patsy he was moving it “mainly on principle, and partly because I’ve had a problem with that Tolliver kid’s attitude since spring.” I had not expected that: how many people had been quietly keeping a list.

Sunday

Mother insisted on Sunday dinner in her own house. She made pot roast and set the table with the Blue Willow plates she has used for every family holiday since 1969.

Amy came at one o’clock with Lily. Craig was not with them.

Amy is thirty-three, a nurse at the county clinic, with Roscoe’s steady hands and my stubbornness. She walked into her grandmother’s kitchen with a face the color of paper and put her forehead against the old woman’s shoulder.

“I’m sorry, Grandma.”

“Child, what on earth for?”

“I told him not to ask you about the boat. I said, she’s seventy-nine, don’t you dare put her name on anything. He said it was a formality, and I let it go because I didn’t want a fight.”

“Honey.” Mother cupped her face. “I’m warm. I’m fed. I’m holding a granddaughter. There is not one thing to be sorry for.”

Lily, who is six and has missing front teeth and a cowlick that no amount of water will lay flat, colored at the end of the table with her purple marker and asked only whether Great-Grandma’s house was warm yet. Mother put her palm on the nearest register and said it was warm as toast.

The porch

At ten past eight on Monday morning I was at Mother’s kitchen table with coffee, listening to the furnace tick on and off, when I heard a vehicle in the gravel. Two doors shut. I looked out the window.

Barry Ackerman was coming up the walk.

Barry is fifty-nine and has run Cass County Savings for twenty-three years. He wears his reading glasses on a cord. He had a gray felt hat in his hands and the look of somebody who had driven home from Branson through the night and not slept.

Behind him came Leonard Whitney on a walking stick, in a clean denim jacket he had obviously pressed. Barry had picked him up on the way. In his left hand was a single sheet of paper, folded once.

Mother came up beside me and smoothed her hair.

“Well,” she said. “Put the kettle on.”

“Dorothy. I’m Barry. I don’t know if you’ll remember me.”

“I remember you, Barry. You bagged groceries at the Piggly Wiggly in a clip-on tie. Come in. You’re letting the heat out.”