I found it. I found it for six years. I sold my grandfather’s baler and my good chisel plow. I sold the cattle. I rented out my ground to a young fellow from Marlow for less than it’s worth because he’d pay on the first. And when all of that was spent and I was still short, I walked down the road to a woman I had no right to ask, and I said, “Marcene, I hate to ask.”
Eight times. A combine belt, I told her. The dog’s teeth. Propane. Tires. Most of those were not true. The dog’s teeth were. The rest of it went to Maple Terrace, to the window and the cottonwood. I told her it was equipment because I could not bear to tell her it was Bert, and I could not tell her that because I knew what she would do. She would have written the check without a word and then she would have asked me to bring him to dinner. And then my brother, who once carried me three miles through a drift on his back, would have sat at that woman’s table, with a napkin tucked in his collar, forgetting her name.
I couldn’t have borne it. That is the whole reason. It is a small reason and a proud one, and it made me a thief of a kind, because a man who takes money under a false name is a thief whatever he calls it.
So you see how it all fit together on that Saturday morning. Eldon said the thing about a kept woman, and it hit the place in me that already knew what I was. A kept man. A man living off a widow’s kindness and lying to her about what for. And instead of saying, I am ashamed, I said, she is charity. I took the shame I could not hold and I handed it to the only person in that building who had never done anything but feed me.