The Pig That Paid a Neighbor’s Bills

The ride to town

It was a Tuesday afternoon in the middle of May, and Owen asked me to drive him to town.

He didn’t say why. He climbed into the passenger seat of my truck in his school clothes, with his backpack on his lap, and rode with me the whole way to Greensburg looking out the window at fields that were just starting to green up in rows. We passed the courthouse with the tree growing out of the top of its tower, which every kid in this county has been told is a miracle and every adult knows is a seed some bird dropped a hundred years ago. We passed the feed store.

“Grandpa, can I ask you something?”

“You can ask me anything. I may not answer.”

“Can you keep a secret from Mom and Dad?”

I kept my eyes on the road, because the right answer to that question is “it depends,” and a boy can tell when you’re giving him that answer. “What kind of secret?”

“A good one.”

“That’s what they all say.”

He almost smiled. Then he looked down at his backpack and said, so low I had to lean over to catch it, “I need to ask some people for something. And I need an adult to drive me, and I don’t want it to be Dad.”

I pulled over at the Dairy Dip, put the truck in park, and turned in the seat to face him.

“Owen. Tell me the whole thing or I’m driving you home.”

He told me the whole thing.

He told it the way he does everything, straight through and in order. He had been thinking about it since the day Mrs. Ferrell got sick. Boone was going to weigh in at about 275 pounds. A grand champion market hog in this county could bring, with the premium that local businesses add, somewhere between five and ten thousand dollars at the sale. He had never kept the money from a hog before. The rules say a good part of it goes into the project fund and into college savings, and his parents had planned on exactly that. Todd and Rhonda had already put a little paper on the refrigerator that said “Owen’s truck fund” with a drawing of a 1998 Ford Ranger he’d been wanting since he was eleven.

“I’ve been looking at that picture for three years,” Owen said. “And then I think about Luke. He told me last week his mom can’t lift her arm right now, so he has to cut up her food. He said it like it was nothing, Grandpa. He’s fourteen years old and he’s cutting up his mom’s food.”

I looked at my grandson, who had gotten up at five-thirty for a hundred and thirty mornings with the express purpose of earning a thing he wasn’t going to keep.

“Does Luke know?”

“No. And nobody can tell his dad.” He said it fast. “Mr. Ferrell won’t take it. You know he won’t. He paid for the Little League uniforms out of his own pocket for two years because he wouldn’t let the team collect for it. If anybody just hands him a check, he’ll tear it up. I know he will.”

That was exactly right, and I knew it, because I know Pete Ferrell. His father was the same, and his grandfather. They’re the kind of men who will drive twenty miles to return a borrowed post-hole digger the same day. They’d sooner lose a leg than be a charity.