Five Thousand Dollars At The Elevator Scale

“I didn’t yell at him,” Gail said to me, like she wanted me to know that. “I’ve never yelled at my son. I just asked him what his father would think. And then I asked him what he thought. And then I hung up and let him sit with it.”

Curtis made a sound that wasn’t quite a laugh. “I sat with it,” he said. “I sat with it all night in the shop.”

“And Thursday,” he went on, “I went in to settle up for the crop. Dale didn’t say a word to me. Dale’s talked my ear off at that scale since I was eight years old. He handed me my settlement sheet and said have a good day. That’s how I knew.”

That was the consequence. Not a fight, not a scene. A seventy year old man who’d known his father just didn’t have anything to say to him. In a town that size, that’s a sentence.

Then Curtis told us all of it. The bank had called his operating loan in July. Not all of it, but enough.

They wanted it paid down by the end of harvest, and they weren’t going to renew the line at the same size next year.

“Two bad years,” he said. “Corn at a price I can’t farm on. I rented too much ground when Dad died, because I was scared to lose any of it. And Ray went to the plant, and I couldn’t hire anybody I couldn’t pay.”

“So I told myself the five thousand made us even.” He looked up at me for the first time. “I told myself it was fair. It was a lie, and I knew it was a lie when I said it in Mom’s driveway. I just couldn’t stand to ask you for help I couldn’t pay for.”

“You could have asked,” I said. “I’d have run it anyway.”

“I know,” he said. “That’s what made it so bad. I knew you would. I knew you’d say yes. And I made it a debt anyway, because a debt I could look at. A favor I couldn’t.”

Amber reached across the table and put her hand on her brother’s arm. She didn’t say anything. She didn’t have to.

Curtis reached into his shirt pocket and took out two small blue books and set them on the table in front of me.

They were savings passbooks from the bank in Westbrook, the kind they still give to kids, with a gold stripe on the cover.

One said Jace Hanlon. One said Jolie Hanlon.

“I went in Saturday morning when they opened,” Curtis said. “Twenty five hundred each. That’s your five thousand. It goes to them. Mom’s on them as custodian, because I figured you’d fight me on it otherwise.”

I opened Jace’s. There it was, typed in by the teller, the date and the deposit. Twenty five hundred dollars. I opened Jolie’s. Same.

“Curtis,” I said.

“Don’t,” he said. And then he almost smiled. “Don’t you dare insult me by trying to give it back.”

I laughed. I couldn’t help it. Amber laughed too, with tears running down her face, and Gail took a tissue out of her purse and handed it to her without looking, the way mothers do.

“That’s not all,” Curtis said. He cleared his throat. “Next fall. I’d like to hire you. Nights on the combine. Going rate, whatever the custom guys get, by the acre. I’ve already talked to the bank about it in my plan. They’d rather pay a good operator than see the crop sit.”