The Pig That Paid a Neighbor’s Bills

Luke

Now I have to tell you about Luke Ferrell, because the whole story turns on him.

Luke and Owen have been friends since kindergarten, when Luke bit another boy over a toy dump truck and Owen was the only one in the class who sat next to him afterward at the snack table. They are different kinds of kids. Owen is careful. Luke is loud, quick to laugh, quick to be sorry, a skinny towhead who has never in his life walked into a room without knocking something over.

Luke’s father, Pete, works second shift at the plant, the same one where Todd works. Pete is a quiet, big-shouldered man who coaches the Little League team and never misses a church supper. Luke’s mother, Annette, drove a school bus for the county. Route 11. She had that bus for nineteen years. I used to see her yellow bus coming over the hill at the Kessler crossroads on my mail route, and she’d lift two fingers off the wheel at me every morning, and I’d lift two back.

When Luke was twelve he started coming out to the hog barn with Owen on Saturdays. He didn’t have a hog. His parents couldn’t afford the project, and Pete wouldn’t take a loan. But Luke mucked out pens and carried water and told Owen’s pig the plot of every movie he’d seen. That summer I started paying him five dollars to mow the lawn he was already mowing for free, and I told Pauline he’d be the one in that group who got his own pig the next year.

Then, the March before the fair, Annette went to the doctor about a lump in her neck she had been ignoring since Christmas.

It was lymphoma. I won’t pretend to know the details. I know it was the kind that responds to treatment if you do the treatment, and that the treatment was in Indianapolis, an hour and a half each way, every other week, and that it was going to take most of a year.

I know about the bills because of the envelopes.

I retired from the route four years ago, but I still know the mail. A new carrier named Kristin has my route now. She stops by the house sometimes, and one afternoon in April she was sitting on my porch with a glass of tea, and she said, not as gossip, but as a person who has to carry things she can’t put down, “Vern, the Ferrells’ box is just full. Every day. Hospital, insurance, collections already on a couple. They’re good people. I don’t know what to do with how much it is.”

I knew what she meant. For thirty-one years I carried those envelopes and I knew what was in them by the weight and the window. A family can be fine on a Tuesday and drowning by Friday, and the mailbox is the first place it shows.

Annette had to stop driving the bus. There was no more of that paycheck. Pete took every extra shift the plant offered, which meant he was home even less. They had insurance, but the deductible was high and the out-of-pocket maximum was a number I won’t repeat here, because it was the kind of number that makes a man put his hand on the back of his neck.

Church took up a collection. Pastor Gene Rademacher at Mount Pleasant Church set up an account at the Decatur County Savings Bank in Annette’s name, and the congregation put in what it could. By May it held a little over eleven hundred dollars. That was what a town of good-hearted people had managed in six weeks, and it wasn’t going to cover one month of what was coming.

Luke stopped coming out to the barn in April. He didn’t say why. He just stopped, and when Owen asked, Luke said he had to help at home.