The Scholarship I Never Told Her About

The Grange awarded the Bessemer Grange Memorial Scholarship that September, at a supper in the church basement. Marcene stood up in a blue dress her mother had made and read a thank-you speech she had written on the back of a seed catalog. I was there. I sat at the end of the last table with a plate of chicken and I could not swallow.

Ansel found me afterward, on the church steps, in the dark. He did not say a thing for a while. Then he said, very low, “How much was it?”

I said, “I don’t know what you mean.”

“All right.” He put his big hand on my shoulder, the way he had put it on my collar that night in the snow. “All right, son. I won’t ask again. She’ll never hear it from me. But you listen. Don’t you tell her, Clem. She’d send it back, or she’d feel she owed you the rest of her life. Let her have it clean.”

“Yes, sir.”

“Now you’ve paid it,” Ansel said. “You’re square with me.”

He died in April of 1979, in the barn, of his heart, the day after a calving. The hands who found him said he looked asleep. I carried a corner of the casket. Marcene was in her second year at Emporia State and had come home in a borrowed car. She stood at the grave in her father’s old gloves, and she did not cry until the first shovel, and then she cried so hard her mother had to hold her up.

I kept my word. That was all I had to give him by then.

Lettie Dunstan kept hers, too. She never said my name to the Grange, and she gave the scholarship out four years running, three hundred each fall, from a tin box in her closet. Every September Marcene wrote her a thank-you note on lined school paper, and Lettie would read it to the members, and every September she would look down the table at me, over her glasses, just once. When Lettie was dying, in the winter of 1996, she sent for me. She had saved the four notes in a rubber band. “These are yours,” she said. “She wrote them to you, you know. She just didn’t know it.” I have them still, in the same Bible, behind the tin.