The Scholarship I Never Told Her About

What I Said

Here is the sentence. I said it on Saturday the twelfth. Marcene already knows the words, because she heard them herself, behind the mineral blocks, with a fifty-pound sack on her hip, and she has never told me she heard. I found that out the same way you are finding it out: from Cora, after.

“Marcene Spurlock is a lonely widow who’s always in my business, boys. I eat her roast so she’s got somebody to cook for. It’s charity, and I’m the one giving it.”

Every word of it was a lie, and I will tell you how the lie got made.

It started with Eldon. Eldon Ruffner is seventy-one and has needled me since the second grade. He said, that morning, grinning, “Clem, I see your truck at the Spurlock place every Sunday. You eating over there or courting?” And then Nolan said, “She’s got a quarter section of her own and no man to farm it. I’d go slow, Clem.” And Eldon said, “He’s gone and got himself a kept woman’s kitchen,” and they all laughed, and I felt something go hot behind my ears.

You have to understand what a table of old farmers is. It is a jury that never adjourns. You do not get to be thought a soft man at that table. You do not get to say that you have been eating at a widow’s table for six years because the house you go home to is quiet enough to hear your own heart in it. You do not say that you have been taking her money because you are short, and you cannot tell them why.