The Wages I Counted at His Table

The Long Drive Home

The boys did not stay long after pie. They are young and they had folding money in their pockets for the first time all summer and somewhere to be. They shook my hand at the door, all three, and Bridger shook it twice and could not get his words lined up, so I just clapped him on the shoulder and told him to tell his daddy hello.

Megan and I helped Mama with the dishes because you do not leave a woman standing in a sink full of Sunday plates. Daddy had gone out to the shop. I could hear him in there not doing anything in particular, moving a wrench from one place to another, the way a man does when he cannot sit in a room with his own thoughts.

In the truck going home Megan put her hand on my knee again.

“You all right,” she said.

“I don’t know what I am,” I told her, and that was the truth. I did not feel like I had won anything. I had paid out seventeen thousand dollars of my own money in that kitchen, money I would not be getting back from the man who owed it, and I had done it in front of my family on purpose, and now I felt hollowed out and a little sick, the way you feel after you have done a hard thing that needed doing.

“You didn’t yell,” she said.

“No.”

“You didn’t say one ugly word to him.”

“No.”

“Then you did it right.” She looked out at the wheat stubble going by gold in the evening sun. “You showed them all what it looks like to pay a man. You didn’t tell them. You showed them. There’s a difference, and your daddy knows it now better than he ever knew it from being told.”

I thought about that the rest of the way home. I thought about being nineteen and starting with one wore-out combine while Daddy called me a fool. I thought about Bridger handing back six hundred dollars he needed. And I thought maybe the thing I had been chasing my whole life was not Daddy’s thirty-five thousand dollars at all. It was for him to see, just once, that the way I run things is not foolishness. That a man who pays his crew in full and on time has built something a land-rich, cash-poor man never quite managed to build, which is people who would walk through fire for him and not for the money.