The Feed Bill a Stranger Paid

I sat at the table that night and wrote the check out to Emil Dorn in my best handwriting, twenty-six thousand four hundred eighteen dollars and sixty cents, with a line at the bottom that said Feed, 1984 to 1992. I put it in my shirt pocket.

Saturday morning was clear and cold, the first hard frost, with every blade of grass in the ditches standing up white.

I drove up the gravel with my hat on the seat beside me and the checks in my pocket and the cards in a Ziploc bag, because I did not trust them to a manila folder. Diane stayed home.

Emil’s place sits back from the road on a rise, at the end of a long lane lined with ash trees that have lost half their branches. I had been past it ten thousand times and never once turned in.

The house is a white two-story with a porch that wraps the front, the paint gone gray in the corners. Behind it stands a red barn that has faded to the color of a brick left out in the rain, with a hip roof and a hayloft door hanging by one hinge.

There was a grain truck parked beside the machine shed, an old International with a wooden box. The garden had gone to fall: tomato cages leaning, a row of dead sunflowers bent over like old men. A windmill stood turning slow over the stock tank, the vane squeaking on every pass.

A dog came off the porch steps before I had the pickup in park. A gray-muzzled mutt, part collie, with one ear that stood up and one that did not. He barked twice for the form of it and then sat down in the gravel to see what I would do.

And there on the porch, in a wooden kitchen chair with a cushion tied to it, was Emil.

I had not seen him in two years, and I knew right away that two years had been a long time. He had gotten small. He wore canvas pants held up by suspenders, a flannel shirt buttoned to the neck, and a coffee cup balanced on his knee.

He watched me get out of the truck. He did not wave. He did not get up. He set the cup on the arm of the chair, very carefully, and I saw his hand was not quite steady doing it.

I took my hat off. I crossed the yard and the dog trotted beside me, tail going. I stopped at the foot of the steps.

“Emil.”

“Vernon.” His voice was drier than I remembered, like paper. “You’re out early for a Saturday.”

“I went to the co-op Tuesday.”

“Is that right.”

“Gary boxed up the old cards. Anything before 1995 was going to the shredder.”

Emil looked at me for a long moment with eyes the color of dishwater, and then past me, out across the lane, to the field where his renter’s bean stubble stood pale in the frost.

“Pfeifer talks too much,” he said.

“He didn’t say your name. I found it.”

“Hm.”

“Two-eleven,” I said.