The Pay at the Sale Barn Cafe

“I know it is,” I said. “I’m not going to say a word about it. But it means he’s not just being greedy.”

“It doesn’t matter why,” Travis said. “It’s still my pay.”

He was right. That is the thing about Travis. He is slow to talk, but when he does, he is usually right.

The next evening was when Emma brought her piggy bank to the table.

She is seven. She had been listening, the way seven-year-olds do when you think they are coloring.

She came in from her room carrying the ceramic pig with both hands, set it down between my coffee cup and the stack of bills, and pulled the rubber stopper out of its belly.

She had fourteen dollars and some pennies in there. Birthday money from her grandma, and quarters from the tooth fairy, and a five-dollar bill Travis had paid her once for helping him stack hay.

“For the house,” she said.

I could not say anything. Travis could. He reached across with his good hand and pulled her into his side and said, “That’s the kindest thing anybody’s done for me all year, sister. You hold on to that. Daddy’s got it.”

She put the pig back in her room. But she left the stopper out of it. She told me later that was so it would be ready.

After she was asleep, Travis and I sat at that kitchen table until almost midnight.

It is an old oak table that was his grandmother’s, and there is a burn mark on one end from a skillet. I put my hand on that burn mark when I am trying to think.

I told him I wanted to talk to Don myself.

He did not like it at first. He said it was his job and his boss and his pay. He said a man ought to handle his own business.

I said he had handled it twice, the right way, in private, and both times Don had walked away from him.

“So what’s different if it’s you?” he asked.

“Where I ask him,” I said.

Every sale day, which was Wednesday at the barn out on the highway, Don ate breakfast at the sale barn cafe at the long table with the same cattlemen he had been eating with for thirty years.

Men he bought from and sold to. Men who had known him since they were all boys.

Those men were the only people in the county whose good opinion Don Hollister cared about more than his own. If he was going to tell anyone “We’ll settle up later,” let him tell it to them.

“You want to shame him,” Travis said.

“No,” I said, and I meant it. “I want to ask him where his word matters. That’s all. I’m not going to yell, and I’m not going to say anything about his account or his bank or anything that isn’t ours. I’m going to ask him for your pay.”

Travis was quiet a long time. Then he said the thing I was most afraid of. “Case, if this goes bad, I don’t work in this county again. Every man at that table hires hands.”

“I know it,” I said.

“Eleven years,” he said. “I don’t want to quit him. I want to go back.”

“Then go back,” I said. “But go back paid.”

He rubbed his face with his good hand.

Then he said, “If you’re going to do it, I’m going to stand right there with you. I’m not sending my wife in alone to ask for my money.”