The Feed Bucket at the Sale Barn Door

He called me from the truck afterward and I held the phone up so he could hear them still clapping.

The checks for the premium sale usually come in the mail about a week after fair.

The buyers settle up at the fair office, and the office sends checks to whoever is listed as owner on the entry. That is how it has always been done.

But Velda at the fair office knew about our bills. Everybody knew about our bills, because I was the one who processed half of them, and there is no privacy in a town of nine thousand.

Most of the buyers paid at the window that same night, and she cut the check first thing the next morning.

She cut it to Ohlde Cattle, because that was the name on the entry. Shawna picked it up at eight o’clock.

By noon she had deposited it in her farm account at the bank and called the hay man. Then she called me back, and that was the phone call in the hallway.

Hay had doubled. The spring had come in dry and then the June rains had come all at once and ruined the first cutting, and round bales that had been forty-five dollars the year before were going for ninety.

Shawna and Lonnie had forty cows to feed through a Missouri winter.

Lonnie had worked at the feed mill in town for eleven years. In April they shut down the second shift and he was one of the men let go.

He had been driving a grain truck part time since, when anybody called him, which was not often enough.

Shawna told herself that the hospital bills were insurance’s problem. She said it to me once in June, before any of this, sitting on her porch steps.

“You’ve got good insurance through the hospital, Sonja. They’ll pay it. That’s what it’s for.”

She was not entirely wrong. We did have good insurance. What she did not see were the deductibles and the gas to Kansas City twice a week and the nights Ray took without pay and the motel when Toby’s counts were too low to drive home.

I could have fought her. I sat in the car in the hospital parking lot on my lunch break and thought about it.

The check had been made out to her farm, on paper it was hers, and every person at the fair office would have told me the same.

I could have gone to the fair board and made a fuss. I could have stood in her yard and said what I thought.

I could have called our mother, who would have called Shawna, and that would have been a war that lasted until one of us was buried.

But that night when I got home and told Toby, he was sitting at the kitchen table with his cap off, rubbing his bare head the way he did when he was thinking.

He listened to all of it. Then he said, “Mom, please don’t say anything bad about Aunt Shawna.”

“Toby,” I said, “she took the money people gave you.”

He shook his head. “She let Rooster eat her grass all year. She came out every night to check his water when I couldn’t. She did my entry when I was in the hospital. I don’t want you two fighting because of me. I just don’t.”

I looked at Ray, who had come home at six still smelling of diesel and wet clay.