The Feed Bill a Stranger Paid

I was twenty-two. I had two years of the ag program at the community college in Norfolk, a pickup with a bad clutch, and a girl I had not yet had the sense to propose to.

What I also had, by the end of that month, was the home place: three hundred twenty acres five miles northwest of town, half of it ours and half rented, sixty sows farrowing year-round, about forty cows, and a bank note on a farrowing house my dad had built in 1981 at fourteen percent.

Land was worth a lot less every year. Hogs sold for barely more than they cost to raise. The interest on the note ate the profit before the check cleared, and every month the numbers on the kitchen table looked a little worse than the month before.

My mother, Ruth, sat at that table with me the night after the funeral with Dad’s checkbook open. She was fifty-four. She had never written a check for more than the church envelope.

“Tell me what we owe, Vernon,” she said. “I’d rather hear it from you than find it.”

I told her. She nodded, once, and got up and started washing the funeral casserole dishes by hand, though we had a perfectly good dishwasher.

Feed was the bill that scared me most, because feed was the bill that never stopped. Sows eat whether the market is up or down. Pigs eat. Cows eat. And there is no way to explain to a hog that the account is past due.

We bought our protein supplement and sow premix and creep feed from the co-op in Elgin, on a charge account, the way my father had since the Eisenhower years.

You paid it down when the hog checks came and you ran it up when they didn’t. The co-op carried you. That was the arrangement, and nobody called it anything.

By February of 1984 I had run that account up to eleven thousand dollars, and I knew it was too much. The manager then was a man named Harlan Reinke. Everyone called him Hap. He was a thick, slow-moving man with reading glasses on a cord, and he had been running the Elgin co-op since 1971.

I walked into his office on a Thursday morning in the middle of a cold snap, with my cap in my hands like a boy at the principal’s door, and asked him for thirty more days.

I remember the radiator ticking. I remember a calendar from a seed company on the wall, turned to the wrong month. I remember that I could not look at his face, so I looked at his glasses cord.

Hap was quiet a long time. Then he said, “Let me see what I can do, Vern. Go on and load what you need.”

I loaded two tons of supplement into my dad’s old flatbed and drove home with my face burning, and I told myself I would never ask that man for another thing as long as I lived.