The Scholarship I Never Told Her About

The Years

I want to say something about what comes after. People think a secret like that is a weight you carry. It isn’t. It is more like a stone in a boot. You walk on it so long you stop knowing you are limping.

Marcene finished her degree and came home to teach third grade. She married Carlin Spurlock in 1983, at the Methodist church, and I sat in the back pew in my suit with my wife Thora, whom I had married three years before. Thora was a good, plain, practical woman who never asked me a hard question in her life. I loved her without any trouble for forty years. When she died I stood in my kitchen holding a ham and I thought I would never eat a hot meal again.

Marcene brought that ham.

I need you to understand that I did not go to that table to collect. I did not go to square anything. I went because she said, “Clem, come Sunday. Noon,” in a voice that had her father’s whole quiet in it, and I did not have another place to go. She never knew that every Sunday she set a plate in front of me, she was setting it in front of a man who owed her family his life. And I never told her, because Ansel said not to, and because it would have turned the dinner into a ledger, with her on one side and me on the other.

That was my excuse, anyway. The truth is that I was a coward, and the secret made it easy.

And so for six years I sat in her husband’s chair and I ate her food and I took her money. And every time I did, I remembered a man in a sheepskin coat saying, You pay it down the road. I would think: I paid it, in 1978. I’m square. And then I would take another three hundred dollars off her, and I’d think, I am a long way from square, Ansel. I am a long way down a different road.

The Weeks Since

I did not go to her Sunday table on the twentieth, or the twenty-seventh, or any Sunday after. I want to be honest. I did not have the right. I ate soup out of a can in my own kitchen and I looked out the window at her lights.

I went to see Bert on the Thursday. He sat in the chair by the south window and watched the cottonwood. His mind has been going slowly for years, the way an old barn goes, a board here and a board there, and some days he knows me and some days I am the man who reads the meters. That Thursday he knew me. He looked at me and he said, “You’ve got a face on, Clemmy.”

I told him the whole thing. I told him about the sentence, the plate, the money. I told him about Ansel. I had never told Bert about Ansel, or anybody.

He was quiet a long while. Then he said, “Does she know it was you?”

“No.”

“Why not?”

“I promised her daddy.”