The Feed Bill a Stranger Paid

“No,” I said. “I’d have said I could manage.”

“That’s what your father would have said. And you couldn’t manage, Vernon. You were twenty-two years old.” He said it kindly, but there was no give in it. “I figured it was easier to take a thing from a stranger than from a neighbor.”

“I thought it was Hap.”

“I know you did. I let you.” He set his cup down. “I was fine with that. Hap earned it, he kept his mouth shut for thirty-five years and never once took a nickel.”

“Then you quit,” I said. “In December of ’92.”

“You were even. The account was even. You didn’t need me anymore.”

“I wouldn’t have been even without you.”

“No,” Emil said, and refilled my cup.

I set the pieces of the check on the step beside me.

“You’ll let me do something,” I said.

“I don’t need anything.”

“Everybody needs something, Emil.” I stood up. “I’m not driving home and going on like I never knew.”

“Probably.”

“Well.” He glanced toward the side of the house, where a garden hose snaked across the grass to a gray spigot. “My pressure tank’s been shot since August. The pump kicks on every time I run a glass of water. I’ve been hauling in jugs from the pump house. I’ll tell my girl myself once it’s in, she’ll fuss either way. I’d get to it myself, but my knees won’t do the crawlspace.”

“I’ll do it.”

“You’ll need a new tank. Forty gallon.”

“Then I’ll need to drive to Norfolk.”

“Don’t tell anybody what it’s for.”

“I’ll need a second pair of hands for the crawlspace. My boy Nathan. I’d tell him a neighbor needs help and nothing more, if you’ll allow it.”

Emil thought about it. “Bring him. Tell him that and no more. And don’t make a thing of it, Vernon.”

“I won’t make a thing of it.”

He nodded once, the way you nod at the end of a handshake.

I went down the steps. The dog followed me to the pickup and sat in the gravel as I climbed in. In the mirror, Emil had settled back into the kitchen chair, with his cup on his knee and the Pyrex pot at his feet, and he was watching the windmill.

I drove to Norfolk that afternoon and bought a forty-gallon pressure tank, a new gauge, two brass unions, and a roll of Teflon tape, and I paid for it out of the farm checkbook and did not say what it was for.

Sunday after Mass I loaded Nathan into the truck. I had told him on the phone only that a neighbor needed a hand. Nathan is thirty-nine and runs most of the acres with me. When he got in beside me and saw the tank in the bed, he said, “Whose?”

“Emil Dorn’s.”

I told him nothing more, and he did not ask.

Emil was on the porch when we pulled in. He had put on a clean shirt. I did not mention it. He stood a while looking at Nathan.

“This the boy?” he said.

“Nathan.”