The Star I Sold Out From Under Her

The Sheet

On Sunday, Ladonna’s daughter brought a copy to the house. A single sheet of white paper, folded in thirds. She said, “Mom thought you ought to see it.” Then she left, and I sat at the kitchen table, and Orris came in from the porch and stood behind my chair.

The front was the star, Berniece’s numbers, redrawn clean, and the fifth point was right.

I turned it over.

The back was the whole story. The freezer paper, the pie plate, the dogwood out the window, the winter before Hollie. Plain words. She never said a hard thing about anyone. She did not say a word about me, or about Hickory Ridge, or about forty dollars. At the bottom, in the same plain type: Drawn by Berniece Brannock, Marble Hollow, Missouri, 1987. Free to copy, free to teach, free to give away. Please keep my name on it.

Please keep my name on it.

“You want to do something about that, or you want to sit here?”

On Wednesday the twenty-first I drove to the print shop in Branson, forty minutes each way, and stood at the counter and gave them a line to set. Ozark Star, designed by Berniece Brannock in 1987. The young man behind the counter asked how to spell her first name, and I spelled it for him one letter at a time, a woman I had known thirty-five years, to a boy who had never heard of her.

Tinley changed the website on Thursday. On Friday, before it was light, I drove into town with the new sheets in a manila envelope and laid them on the Brannocks’ porch. I did not knock. Arvel’s truck was in the drive. I did not write a note. Anything I wrote would have been a performance.

On Sunday the other four went to her kitchen. They asked me to come. I said I could not, which was true and was also a coward’s answer. Iona took the folder. Berniece would not touch a cent, and sent every dollar to the library for the Saturday class, and I do not blame her one bit. The four others gave a thousand each. I am to pay my $4,700 at two hundred dollars a month, out of the house cleaning, for about two years. It is only fair.

I am still behind. The kit money went to the billing office in Springfield, and we owe about $4,300 between the hospital and the feed store. I will finish that the old way, with a mop and a bucket.