The Pig That Paid a Neighbor’s Bills

“So how do you give a man money he won’t take?” I said.

“I don’t give it to him,” Owen said. “I give it to the fund at the church. And I don’t do it quiet. I do it where everybody sees. Because if everybody sees, he can’t say no without saying no to the whole county.”

I sat there and the engine ticked.

I want to be fair to myself and say I did not have a clean first reaction. The first thing I felt wasn’t pride. It was fear. A fourteen-year-old boy was proposing to give away something that his parents had counted on, a boy who had worked for it with his own hands, and I was about to help him do it behind their backs.

“I’ll drive you wherever you need to go,” I said. “But I’m not keeping this from your parents. Not past the fair. I’ll give you until the Wednesday before. Then you tell them or I do.”

“Deal.”

“And if your dad says no, it’s no.”

Owen looked at me with a seriousness I have not often seen in anyone his age. “Grandpa, if Dad says no, I’ll do what he says. But I think he won’t.”

Faye and Bud and the pastor

Faye Linnemeier has been treasurer of the Decatur County Fair board since before Owen’s mother was born. She is small and sharp and keeps a ledger in pencil. If you want to know where a nickel went in 1994, Faye can tell you, and she will also tell you what you did wrong.

Owen went to see her the last week of May. I drove him, and I waited in the truck, because he had asked me to. Two days later Faye phoned me.

“Vern, I’ve been on that board thirty-eight years, and no child has ever asked me what that boy asked me.”

“What did he ask?”

“If the sale check can be made out to someone other than the exhibitor.” She cleared her throat. “It can, as it happens. There’s a form. Nobody’s ever used it. The exhibitor can designate a payee. It was written in for a boy in 1987 whose family needed the money for a barn fire, but in the end they didn’t need it.”

I said, “What did you tell him?”

“I told him yes. And then I asked him why. And Vern, I have been sitting here ever since.”

She did not say another word about it. But a week later she and Owen and Pastor Gene Rademacher sat down together at a table in the church fellowship hall, and the pastor, who is a thin, gentle man with a voice like worn flannel, agreed that the money would go straight into the account the church had already set up in Annette’s name, with a letter attached that Owen wrote himself on notebook paper. The bank would apply it where the Ferrells needed it. Neither Pete nor Annette would ever be asked to sign a thing to receive it.

And then Owen went to see Bud Kilgore.

I was there for that one, because Bud lives three miles from me and the boy wanted to ask in person. We found Bud on his porch in a lawn chair, with a glass of sweet tea and a dog asleep on his feet. Owen told him everything in about four sentences.

Bud, who I had never in my life seen cry or even sit down in a hurry, took off his glasses and looked at the yard for a while.

“You understand,” he said, “that if I say it from the ring, I can’t take it back. Once it’s said, it’s said, and the whole barn will have heard it. And if the Ferrells are sitting there, it’ll land on them in front of everybody.”

“Yes, sir. That’s why.”

Bud put his glasses back on. “I’d have said the same thing at your age if I’d had your sense.” He rubbed the dog’s head with his boot. “I’ll do it. But I want one thing from you. When the time comes, I want you standing there next to that pig. Not behind a post. Not hiding. People ought to be able to see who did it.”

That’s how it was set up. Four adults and one boy knew: Bud, Faye, Pastor Rademacher, and me. The rest of Decatur County had no idea.