The Scholarship I Never Told Her About

The Scholarship

In the summer of 1978, Marcene graduated from Bessemer High School at the top of her class.

She was eighteen. She wanted to teach. Everybody knew it. She had been teaching every kid on the school bus to read since she was ten. There was a place for her at Emporia State, in the fall, and the money for it did not exist. The Deverells had a hundred and twenty acres and a mortgage and a note at the bank. Ansel had done everything right in his life and had nothing to show for it, the way a lot of good men out here do.

I was working for him that August, helping put up the last cutting. I heard him tell his wife at the kitchen window, not knowing I was by the truck. “She’ll have to stay home and clerk at the Rexall, Ruth. I can’t do it. I’d sell the place before I’d sign another note.”

I did not sleep that night.

I had eleven heifers. They were the only thing in the world I owned free and clear, I had raised them from calves, and I could have sold them to a man in Iola that week for twelve hundred dollars. That was precisely what I did, on a Thursday.

Now here is what I did next, and I am not proud of how I did it, only of what it did. I could not give the money to Ansel. A proud man will not take charity from a boy he once pulled out of a ditch. I couldn’t give it to Marcene. She would have asked where it came from, and she would have been right to refuse. So I went to the Bessemer Grange, Number 612, which met on the second Tuesday over the hardware store, and I found the treasurer, Lettie Dunstan, who was seventy then and had known my mother. I put twelve hundred dollars in her hands in an envelope and I said, “Mrs. Dunstan, I want to start a scholarship.”

She looked at me a long time. “In whose name?”

“The Grange’s. A memorial. Call it anything. Three hundred a year for four years. First recipient is Marcene Deverell, if she’ll take it, and she is never to know where it came from. Nobody is.”

“Clement Plackett,” Lettie said, “you are twenty-six years old.”

“Yes, ma’am.”

She did not ask me why. She took out her receipt book, the green one with the carbon sheets, and she wrote it up in her careful teacher’s hand. She tore off the top copy for the Grange’s books. She gave me the carbon, and I have it still.