The Feed Bill a Stranger Paid

I found the D tab and walked my thumb back through the cards, reading the numbers in the corners, until I reached 211 and stopped.

Dorn, Emil and Marlene. Account 211. I stood there holding that card.

Emil Dorn.

I knew Emil Dorn the way you know a neighbor you have never needed. He farmed a section and a half a mile and a half north of us on the gravel, quiet as a fence post, a lean man who raised hogs in the seventies and switched to corn and beans in the nineties and kept Barred Rock hens until his wife passed.

He was the kind of man who lifted two fingers off the steering wheel when you met him on the road and did not slow down to chat. He never came to the cafe. He sat in the third pew from the back at Mass and left before the coffee and rolls.

Nine years of his money. Gary was sitting in Hap’s old chair with his hands between his knees.

“Is he alive?” I asked.

“Emil? He’s eighty. Lives out there by himself since Marlene went. His girl wants him in Lincoln, he won’t go.”

“Can I have these cards?”

“Vern, they’re company property.”

“Gary. They’re going in a shredder.”

He rubbed his face. Then he said, “You’ll go out there and make a fuss. Emil’s not going to like a fuss. Hap said when he set it up that the man did not want one word of thanks, not from you, not from the Lord God Almighty. I’d like to keep it a favor. You understand me? A favor, not a bill.”

“I understand.”

“Take the cards,” Gary said. “Take them and go.”

I took them. I took two sacks of mineral to the pickup too, and I paid for them,. I did not say goodbye. I did not know what to say.

Diane was at the kitchen table when I got home, with the school lunch menu spread out in front of her, because she runs the kitchen at the elementary now and she still plans it on paper.

I put the rubber-banded cards down in front of her without a word. She looked at them, then at me, then pulled the top one over and read it with her glasses pushed up on her forehead.

It took her longer than it had taken me. She is a careful reader.

“Two-eleven,” she said finally.

“Emil Dorn.”

She put the card down very gently, like it might spill. Then she said the thing I did not expect.

“Well, you’re not going to write him a check and leave it on his porch like a coward.”

“I was thinking I’d bring it to him.”

“With the cards?”

“With the cards. And a check. For all of it, twenty-six thousand, four hundred eighteen sixty.”

“Vern.” She took her glasses off. “That man paid in pencil for nine years so you would never have to look him in the face. You think he’s going to want a check?”

“I think I owe him.”

“Then go see him,” she said. “Don’t send it.”