The Feed Bucket at the Sale Barn Door

We counted it at the kitchen table after midnight, Ray and me, in our socks, whispering so we would not wake him.

It came to six thousand eight hundred and forty dollars in cash and checks, and every check was made out to Toby Lammers.

Ray put his head down on the table on his folded arms. I thought he was asleep.

Then I saw his shoulders and knew he was not, and I got up and stood behind him with my hand on his back, the same way I had stood behind our boy.

Before we went to bed, Toby woke up long enough to ask how much it was. When I told him, he was quiet.

Then he said, “Can we use some of it for gas to Kansas City? So Dad doesn’t have to take nights off?”

“Yes,” I said. “We can do that.”

“And can I save some for a heifer?” he asked. “For next year. If I’m better.”

“When you’re better,” Ray said from the doorway. “Yes, bud. You can save some for a heifer.”

Shawna did not call that Friday. She did not call the next week either.

I heard from our mother that she had not gone to church that Sunday, and that Lonnie had gone without her and sat in the back.

I want to say something about Lonnie. Lonnie Ohlde is a good man.

The Monday after the hog sale he drove into the county shed at six in the morning and found Ray at the fuel pump and asked if he could talk to him.

Ray told me about it that night. He said Lonnie stood there with his hands in his jacket pockets and said, “I didn’t know she cashed it, Ray. I knew the check came. I didn’t know she took the whole thing. I should have known. I’m sorry.”

Ray said he told Lonnie that he did not blame him, and that a man who has lost his job and is watching his wife try to keep forty cows alive through a dry year does not always ask the questions he ought to.

Then they stood at the fuel pump and drank bad coffee from the shed pot.

It was hard for Shawna in town after that. Nobody was cruel to her. That was not the way of the people in our county.

But everybody had been in that sale barn or knew somebody who had, and she felt it in the grocery store and at the elevator and in the pew.

I did not go to her. I am not proud of that. I told myself I was respecting her, giving her room, but I think I was also afraid.

I had never once in my life won anything against my sister, and I did not want to start now.

Toby went back to Kansas City for his third round on the second of August. He wore Edsel’s hat to the hospital.

The nurses on the fourth floor loved it. One of them, a big gentle woman named Rhonda, called him Cowboy for the rest of his treatment.

He was sick that round, sicker than the first two. Dr. Hughes said it was expected, that the third round was always the hardest, and that his scans so far were exactly where she wanted them. I held onto that sentence like a rope.

On the fourth day, in the afternoon, I was sitting in the chair by his bed doing the crossword from the paper when somebody knocked softly on the door frame. I looked up and it was Shawna.