The Feed Bill a Stranger Paid
In the credits column, there were two kinds of entry. There were my own payments, which I recognized: a hundred and forty here, four hundred there, after a load of hogs went to Norfolk, written in Hap’s square hand.
And in between them, in a different pencil, there was something else. The first was dated February 16, 1984. Two weeks after I sat in Hap’s office. It said, in plain pencil: Cr. by Acct. 211, $600.00. Every one of those entries said the same thing and nothing more.
Then I turned the page and found it again. March 28. Acct 211, $350.00. April 19. Acct 211, $425.00. Then May, then June.
They stopped on the tenth of December, 1992. The last entry was $210.40, and below it, in Hap’s ink, one line. Bal. fwd. 0.00.
Nine years, give or take two months. I counted the pages, and I counted the entries, and then I took out my phone and added them on the calculator, because my hands were not steady enough to trust my head.
The total came to twenty-six thousand, four hundred eighteen dollars and sixty cents. I looked up. Gary was looking at the floor.
“Gary,” I said. “Who’s two-eleven?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“You’ve worked this counter since 1977. You know every account number in this building.”
“There’s a lot of numbers, Vern.”
“Somebody paid my family’s feed bill for nine years, in pencil, and Hap never told me.” I put my finger on the line. “Was that the co-op? Did the board do this?”
He shook his head before he could stop himself.
“No, no. The board never knew a thing about it. Hap made sure of that, he’d have been in hot water.” He rubbed his forehead with the back of his wrist. “That wasn’t the co-op, Vern. That was two-eleven, and it was all two-eleven, from the first dollar. And I promised Hap in 1984 I’d keep my mouth shut about it, and I’ve done it for forty-two years, and now I go and do this in the last week.”
He stopped. He had heard himself.
“I didn’t say that,” he said.
“Yes, you did.”
“Well.” He put both hands flat on the counter, the way he does. “Then I’ll say the rest of it. I’m not telling you the name, Vern. I gave my word. But I’m seventy-one and that drawer is going in a shredder on Friday and I am not a good enough liar to stand here and watch you read your own card.”
He turned and walked into the back office and I heard him pull a chair out. The drawer was still open, and I did not need him to tell me the rest. Two-eleven was a low number. Hap had numbered the book A to Z in 1971, and ours, at 402, sat in the H’s. Two hundred eleven would be a few drawers back, in the D’s.