“Kyla’s got six hundred dollars in the bank,” I said. “The funeral’s going to run about nine thousand. Her folks are going to help, and the church is going to help, but they don’t have a lot either.”
I set the coffee can on the counter by the sugar.
“I’m not telling anybody what to do,” I said. “I’m just putting this here.”
That was all. I did not mention Hobart. I did not mention the card.
It was not my business to tell that, and I could see in a couple of the older guys’ faces that they had already heard something anyway. In a town this size, things travel.
Juddy walked up first. Juddy is fifty-one and has a bad shoulder from thirty years of pushing a power screed, and he does not have much more money than anybody else.
He took out his wallet and counted out two hundred dollars in twenties and dropped it in.
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“That was for a new deer rifle,” he said to nobody. “Old one shoots fine.”
Pete went next. Pete is about my age and has four girls, and I knew what his money looked like.
He put in a hundred and forty and said it was his license and gas money for the opener, and he could hunt his brother-in-law’s land closer to home this year.
Ivan put in a hundred. Lonnie put in eighty and said he would bring more Friday.
A couple of the guys did not have cash on them and went across the road to the gas station and came back with it.
And then the new kid, Tanner, who was nineteen and had been with us since June, came up last with sixty dollars in his hand.
He looked at the can and then at me, and his ears were red.
“I’m sorry it’s not more,” he said. “I get paid Friday. I can do more Friday.”
“Sixty is plenty,” I said. “Sixty is a lot of money.”
“Sully showed me how to edge,” he said. “Nobody else would take the time. He just took the time.” And then he walked out to his truck fast, before anybody could see his face.
By Friday the can held eighteen hundred dollars. Most of it was in twenties.
Some of it was in fives and ones, and one man, I never did find out who, put in a folded check for three hundred dollars with the name torn off the top so nobody would know.
Fourteen men. Eighteen hundred dollars. It came to about a hundred and thirty apiece, which is a day’s pay and then some for most of those guys, a day’s pay in late October when every man on the crew knew the long winter was right behind it.
Jodi and I drove it out to Kyla’s on Friday night in a bank envelope. I had counted it three times at our kitchen table.
I did not want to hand that woman a dollar less than what those men had put in.
Kyla’s dad was there, a heavyset man named Vernon Olson who farmed a little south of Tracy and drove truck in the winters.
He was sitting at the table with the funeral home’s paperwork spread out in front of him and a pencil behind his ear.
I set the envelope on the paperwork. “That’s from the crew,” I said. “All fourteen of us.”
Kyla opened it. She did not cry. I think she was past crying by Friday. She just held the envelope in both hands and looked at it, and then she looked at her dad.