The Scholarship I Never Told Her About

February 1977

I have to go back now, further than the money.

The end of January in 1977 was the coldest I can remember. We had a blizzard come through the last days of the month and into February, thirty below with the wind, and the county roads drifted shut in an afternoon. I was twenty-four. I was not a good young man. I had a ’73 Ford pickup, a bad habit of drinking at a tavern in Marlow on Friday nights, and a girl in town I thought I was going to marry, who went on, as it turns out, to marry somebody better.

I left the tavern about midnight on the first of February, a Tuesday, in all that snow. I was fool drunk. About two miles from home, on County Road 14, in front of the old Deverell place, I put the truck down into the ditch to the axles. The engine quit. The wind was so high it moved the truck on its springs.

I want you to see it. I was a man alone on a road in a blizzard at thirty below, drunk, in a coat I had bought for the fall. I had maybe a half hour. I did not know that. I thought I was fine. I thought I would walk. I got out and I walked about forty yards and lay down in the snow, because it felt warm.

I remember lights. A tractor, a Farmall, with a lantern on the fender, and a big man in a sheepskin coat getting down off it and taking me by the collar the way you would lift a calf. “Get up, son,” he said. “Get up. I’ve got you.”

That was Ansel Deverell. Marcene’s father.

He had been up with a sick cow, he told me later, and heard my engine whine and quit on the road, and he went out in that wind to find out why.

He got me on the tractor. He hauled my truck out of the ditch, with a log chain, at two in the morning. He took me into his kitchen, and his wife put a quilt around me, and I sat by the stove for the rest of that night while the whole house slept. And in the morning, with the light coming up pink over the drifts, Ansel put a cup of coffee in front of me and said, “I won’t be telling your father, and I won’t be telling anybody. You’ll know what you were doing.”

I was so ashamed. I said, “Mr. Deverell, I owe you my life.”

“No,” he said. “You don’t owe me. You pay it down the road, to the next one who needs it.”

That is all he said about it. He never spoke of it again, not once in two years, though I came to hay for him that summer, and the next. He was a quiet, fair man who paid on Friday and never raised his voice.

He did have a daughter, who was sixteen in 1977 and a good deal smarter than I was. She took the lunches out to the hayfield. She did not talk to me except to ask if I wanted lemonade. I was eight years older, and I took lemonade from her and thought about nothing at all.