The Feed Bill a Stranger Paid

“And your dad came in in his barn coat. He smelled like sows. I want you to know that, he came in right off the hog lot, with straw on his boots. He had heard about Leo at the elevator. He did not say hello. He walked straight past me to Schenk’s door, and I heard him say, ‘What’s it going to take.'”

I said nothing. The dog sighed against my knee.

“Schenk said a signature. Your father said, ‘Show me where.'” Emil’s voice did not change at all. “He signed under mine. Nine thousand dollars, in 1969, with a wife and a boy at home, and a farm that wasn’t any richer than mine. He walked out, and on the bank steps I tried to shake his hand, and he said, ‘I’ve got pigs to feed,’ and got in the truck.”

“He never said a word to me about it.”

“No. I’d guess not.”

“Did you pay it back?”

“Every dollar. Six years. I took it to the bank myself so he wouldn’t have to hear.” Something moved at the corner of his mouth. “I brought him a ham in 1975. A whole smoked ham, from the locker in Neligh. I drove it to your place and he stood on that porch and looked at it like I’d handed him a dead dog. He said, ‘Give it to your mother, Emil.'”

I laughed. That was my father exactly.

“So you could never thank him,” I said.

“Not once in fourteen years. He wouldn’t take it.” Emil looked up at the barn. “And then he went down in that barn in September of ’83, and I stood in the back of the church in Elgin and I thought, well, that’s that.”

“And that February I went to Hap.”

“I know you did.” Emil nodded. “I was in line behind you with a sack of garden seed in my hand. I watched Hap come out of that office, and I watched your face.”

I did not remember it at all.

“I went to Hap that week and told him what I meant to do,” Emil said. “It took me till the sixteenth to scrape the first of it together. Six hundred dollars, a corn sale and Marlene’s egg money. I told him to put it on your account and not to tell you. I told him not to tell the board either, because they’d have made a policy out of it, and you’d have heard.”

“He took it?”

“He said, ‘Emil, that’s a lot of money for a man with his own bills.’ I said, ‘Then I’ll pay it slow.'”

And he had. Pencil entries, nine years of them, whenever he had a few hundred left over after the bank and the seed dealer and the property tax. Sometimes it was a month of Marlene’s egg money. Once, in the fall of 1988, a check for nine hundred dollars that turned out to be the whole price of a heifer he had sold at the Norfolk sale barn.

“Why didn’t you just tell me?” I said. It came out harder than I meant.

Emil considered me with those pale eyes.

“Would you have taken it?”

I opened my mouth. Then I shut it.