The Envelopes in My Father’s Bible

September

I want to tell you about September, because it is the Sunday I think about most.

The week before, my car needed a water pump, and the feed store had cut everybody back to thirty-two hours for the slow month before harvest.

I had four hundred and forty dollars. I didn’t have five hundred, and there was no more to find.

I put the four hundred and forty in the envelope and sat in my car outside the cafe trying to decide what to say.

I had never been short on a debt in my life. My mother would have gone without supper first.

When I sat down, I slid it across like always. “It’s short, Dad,” I said quietly, so the others wouldn’t hear. “It’s sixty short. I’ll make it up in October. I’m sorry.”

Dad didn’t say anything. He picked up the envelope and put it in the pocket of his plaid flannel shirt, the red and black one he wears every Sunday of his life.

Then he reached across the table and put his big hand over mine. His knuckles are knotted from fifty years of milking.

His hand was warm from the coffee cup, and it covered mine the way it did when I was small.

“Nicky,” he said. “When you were six, you had pneumonia, and we drove you to Rochester in the middle of the night in a blizzard. Your mother held you in the back seat the whole way. I prayed out loud for seventy miles.”

“I know, Dad,” I said. I could barely get the words out.

“I’d have given every cow on the place that night,” he said. “Every one. You don’t owe me sixty dollars. You never owed me a dime. I want you to hear me say it.”

Orv cleared his throat and looked very hard at the pie case.

Pete got up to use the restroom, which he had never once done in the middle of coffee. Leon just sat there with his hands folded on the table.

I made up the sixty in October anyway. Dad tried to push it back across the table, and I put my hand flat on top of it and wouldn’t let him. “The ledger has to balance, Dad,” I said. He laughed and let me win that one.

Harvest

October and November were harvest. Combines on the roads at night, grain trucks lined up at the elevator, the whole county smelling like bean dust.

He had a decent harvest. Not a great one, but decent. I knew because Pete told the table in November, the way Pete tells everybody everything. “Scott Hartwig got sixty bushel beans on the Olson ground,” he said. “Best he’s had in years.”

Nobody at the table said anything to that. Orv looked at me for a second, then at Dad, and I watched him put something away in his head for later.

Envelope number nine went across in November. Four thousand five hundred dollars by then.

I had it written on the legal pad at home, a column of fives down the side, with a check mark next to each one.