The Feed Bill a Stranger Paid

He put both hands on the arms of the chair and began to rise. I started up the steps to help him and he said, “Stay where you are,” and I stopped. It took him a while, and I let it.

When he was standing, he was eye to eye with me from the second step, a little taller than I’d have guessed, with a back as straight as a post. He looked at the Ziploc bag in my hand.

“You brought paper,” he said.

“I brought the cards. And I brought this.”

I took the check out of my pocket and held it out. He looked at it without touching it, and read what was written on the line at the bottom.

“Feed, 1984 to 1992,” he said. “You always did write a neat hand. Your dad’s was worse.”

“It’s what the card says. All of it.”

“I don’t want it.”

“Emil.”

“I said I don’t want it, Vernon.”

He did not raise his voice. He took the check between two fingers, folded it once down the middle, then again, and tore it along the crease with a small dry sound like a stalk of corn snapping. Then he tore it again.

He handed me back the pieces.

“Sit down,” he said. “You’ll want coffee.”

He went into the house on his own, slow, one hand on the doorframe, and I sat on the top step with the dog’s head against my knee. I heard a kettle, a cupboard, a spoon.

He came back with two cups and a Pyrex pot, and he lowered himself into the chair again, and we sat there with the dog between us.

“I’m not going to thank you,” I said. “Gary said you’d hate that.”

“Gary’s right about that.”

“But I need to know why.”

Emil drank some coffee. He took his time. The windmill squeaked twice.

“Your dad ever tell you about October of 1969?” he said.

“No.”

“I figured he wouldn’t.”

He told it plain, like a man reading off a feed ticket.

In October of 1969, Emil’s father, Leo, took a tractor along the creek bank on their north quarter to pull out a stuck gate post. The bank gave. The tractor went over. That was all there was to say about it, Emil told me, and I did not ask for more.

Emil was twenty-three. His mother, Agnes, was a widow with a bad heart. There were two hundred forty acres, a mortgage, and an operating note at the bank in Elgin for nine thousand dollars that had come due the week of the funeral.

“I went in to see old Mr. Schenk,” Emil said. “He looked at me over the top of that desk and said, ‘Emil, you’re a boy.’ He said the bank did not lend to boys. He said I could sell out and rent a house in town and work at the elevator.”

“What did you do?”

“I sat in the lobby. I didn’t know what else to do. I sat on that bench for an hour with my hat on my knee.”

He turned the cup in his hands.