The Envelopes in My Father’s Bible

Twenty-two Sundays

The next morning I sat down at the little table in my rooms with a legal pad and a pencil. Eleven thousand dollars. I make nineteen dollars an hour at the feed store.

After rent and my car and groceries and the electric, I could find five hundred dollars a month if I gave up some things.

Eleven thousand divided by five hundred is twenty-two. Twenty-two months. A little under two years.

I wrote it at the top of the pad and underlined it twice, the way I underline a total at work.

I decided I would pay him in cash, in person, on the first Sunday of every month, at the cafe after church. I could have mailed a check.

I could have set up a transfer at the bank. But I wanted him to see me do it, and I wanted to see him.

And if I am honest, there was another part of it. I wanted somebody in that town to see me paying for the tractor, even if they didn’t know what it was.

I’m not proud of that part. But it’s true, and I said I would tell this straight.

On the inside of each envelope flap I wrote the number in pencil. One of twenty-two. Then two of twenty-two.

It was a bookkeeper’s habit. I wanted a record, even if the only record was in my own handwriting.

That first Sunday in March, Pete said what he said about Scott, and I said what I said, and Dad put his hand over the envelope.

After that, nobody mentioned Scott at the table for a long time.

The second Sunday was in April. The ditches were running with snowmelt and the fields were black and steaming in the sun. I slid the envelope across, and Dad said, “You don’t owe me this, Nicky,” and I said, “A debt is a debt, Dad.”

It became a kind of liturgy, like the call and response at church. I think we both needed it.

In May the planters were out, and the cafe was thin because half the men in the county were in the field. Dad’s table still had all four of them.

Orv’s grandson was planting for him by then, Leon had rented his ground out years ago, and Pete never farmed at all. He drove milk truck for thirty-one years.

The coffee men

I should tell you about them, because they matter to how this ends.

Orv was eighty and the oldest. He had farmed the ridge north of town for fifty years and served in the Army in Germany in the sixties.

He didn’t say much, and when he did, the whole table got quiet to hear it.

Leon was seventy-four, a widower like Dad. He had been the high school shop teacher, and half the men in town still called him Mr. Berg out of habit. He fixed small engines in his garage and never charged anybody what the job was worth.

Pete was the talker. Seventy, round, cheerful, the one who knew who was in the hospital in La Crosse and whose daughter was expecting and what the elevator was paying for beans.

He meant no harm by any of it. News ran through Pete like water through a culvert.

They had been sitting at that table every first Sunday since before I was born.

Other Sundays they scattered to their own kitchens and their own grandkids, but on first Sundays, after the early service, they met at the cafe and had the same pie and argued about the Vikings.

June, July, August

In June, Pete started changing the subject when I sat down. He’d finish his sentence about the Twins and leave it there.

In July, the cafe was hot and the ceiling fans were going. Deb, who has waited tables there since high school, brought my rhubarb pie without asking.

I slid the envelope over. Dad said his line and I said mine.

That was the month I saw Scott’s pickup parked at the church for the late service. He had switched.

For eighteen years we went to the early service together, and now he went to the late one, and I understood why. The early service let out right before Dad’s coffee.

He couldn’t face my father. I knew that, even then, and some small mean part of me was glad about it. I’m not proud of that either.

In August I slid envelope number six across the table.

Leon, without a word, got up and went to the counter and came back with a fresh cup of coffee and set it in front of me.

“You looked like you could use that,” he said.

That was all. But I sat there and drank it and had to look out the window for a minute before I could trust my face.