The Feed Bill a Stranger Paid

I did not. For nine years I did not ask Hap Reinke or anyone else for anything.

I married Diane Kuhn that June in her mother’s church. She was a nurse’s aide at the care home in Neligh, working nights, and the first thing she did after the wedding was sit down with the farm books and say, “Okay. Show me.”

Our son, Nathan, was born in the spring of 1987. Our daughter, Beth, came in the fall of 1990. Between those two babies we sold the cows. All forty. We kept the sows because the sows paid, when anything did. I built a cow herd back up in the nineties, a few head at a time, and I run seventy of them today.

I will not go through every one of those years. I will say that there was a winter I fed pigs in a coverall with the knees worn through because new ones were thirty dollars.

What I remember most is the co-op counter. Every month I went in and watched the number on Hap’s statement, and every month I held my breath.

That balance should have grown. I knew the arithmetic better than I knew my own phone number. It should have crawled up past fifteen thousand, then past twenty, and the day it crossed the line where the co-op could not carry us, we would be done.

It never did. It hovered. Some months it even dropped, though I had not paid anything near that much. I figured Hap was shaving the service charge. I figured he was being decent, the way a man in a small town sometimes is, and I was too ashamed to ask.

On Christmas Eve of 1992, Hap Reinke called me over to the end of the counter and handed me a slip of paper and shook my hand.

“You’re even, Vern,” he said. “Zero balance. Merry Christmas.”

I did not say a thing. I folded that slip in half and put it in my shirt pocket.

I had spent nine years thinking one thing about that debt. I thought Hap carried us. I thought a good man, out of the goodness of his heart, had stretched the rules until I could climb out from under.

I kept right on thinking it. When Hap died in 2019, I stood in line at the visitation in Neligh for forty minutes and told his widow, Louise, that her husband had carried my family through the eighties.

She patted my hand and said, “He never talked business at home, Vern.” I took that as modesty. I took it as Hap’s. I drove home proud of him.

Now Gary Pfeifer stood across the counter from me in the empty feed store, with a cardboard box between us, and the lid came off, and there was the Halstead card.

It was not one card, really. It was a stack of them, held with a rubber band so old it had fused to the paper. The earliest was my dad’s, with his signature in blue ballpoint at the top, the W looped like a rope. In the corner, in Hap’s pencil, was our number: 402. My father used to say it like a joke, “We’re four-oh-two, Vernon, right between the Haases and the Hoffmans.” Hap had numbered every account A to Z the year he took over the co-op, and anything opened after that went in the back of the book.