The Pay at the Sale Barn Cafe

We had not ordered. I told him so. He said, “Then order. It’s still paid for.”

So we sat down at the counter, on the red stools, and the girl brought us coffee, and Travis ordered biscuits and gravy because he could eat them with a fork in his left hand.

I ordered two eggs over easy and toast. I could not eat any of it. Travis ate all of his and then most of mine.

While we sat there, the talk at the long table came back up slowly, one man at a time, the same way it had gone down.

Calf prices. Rain. Whose wheat had come up. Nobody looked at us. I understood that was a kindness.

Hank sat down on the stool next to Travis while he was finishing my toast. He set his cane against the counter and folded his hands.

“How long’s the doctor say you’re out?” he asked.

“Cast comes off after Christmas,” Travis said. “Then therapy. He says horseback in March, if I do what they tell me.”

“You going to do what they tell you?”

“My wife’s going to make me.”

Hank nodded like that was the right answer. “I need a man in the back,” he said. “Sale days, Wednesday and Saturday. Somebody to work the alley gates and call pen numbers up to the scale house and keep the young ones from getting killed. You can do that with one arm if you’ve got the sense. You’ve got the sense.”

Travis looked at him. “Hank, I can’t sort cattle like this.”

“Didn’t ask you to sort. Asked you to watch the gates and keep the count. My regular man’s quitting at Thanksgiving to go to the oil field. I’ll pay you a hundred and fifty a day, cash, and lunch. Through March. Or until your arm says otherwise.”

That was about thirteen hundred dollars a month for two days a week. It was not four thousand. But it was thirteen hundred dollars we did not have that morning.

“Why?” Travis asked him. Just like that. Travis does not dress things up.

Hank looked over at Don in the booth by the window, and back at Travis.

“Because I’ve known Don Hollister fifty years,” he said, “and he’s a good man who did a bad thing. And you’re a good man who didn’t. I’d like to see the good men in this county keep working. That’s all.”

When we got in the truck, Travis took the check out of his shirt pocket and looked at it for a long time, the way he had looked at the other one on the first of the month. Then he handed it to me.

“You keep it,” he said. “You earned it as much as I did. I don’t know if I’d have walked in there first.”

We drove straight to the bank. I deposited the check, and it cleared the next morning, and I paid the mortgage on Thursday, a full day before the fifteenth.

I sat in the car after and cried for about ten minutes, and then I went to work.

That Wednesday night, before bed, the kids finally got to sign his cast. They had been asking since he came home, but the doctor had said to wait until the swelling settled and the hard cast went on.

It was white from his wrist to his elbow, and they had been eyeing it like a coloring book.