Nine Saturdays at the Sale Barn

“It’s borrowed, Shawna. Not gone. Borrowed.” My father-in-law said it from his porch swing on a Sunday in August, with the noon sun flat across his yard and his church shoes still on.

I was holding a plate of peach cobbler I had brought over for him. I remember that, because I remember thinking I should set it down before I dropped it.

“Borrowed for what, Gene?” I asked. My voice came out quiet. It usually does when something has gone wrong. I learned that in a school kitchen, where yelling only gets the gravy burned.

He rubbed the back of his neck and looked out at the milo field across the road. “The boys and I took a lease down by the Cimarron. Deer and birds. My share was fourteen hundred.”

Fourteen hundred dollars. That was the exact number in the coffee can. He did not even have the decency to round it off and pretend it was a coincidence.

My husband, Randy, was standing at the bottom of the porch steps with his hat in his hand. He had driven us over after church like we did most Sundays. I watched the color go out of his face.

“Dad,” he said. “That was Hailey’s.”

“I know whose it was,” Gene said. “I’ll have it back after harvest. My share of the fall crop comes in by November. She’ll never know it was gone.”

“She leaves in October,” I said.

That was when he looked at me for the first time. Gene Pittman is seventy-one years old. He farmed the same section of ground for forty-six years before he rented it out to the Unruh family and moved his chair to the porch. He is not a cruel man. That is what made it so hard.

He just said, “Well. She’ll have to wait a year, then.”

Our daughter, Hailey, was in the car with the windows down, scrolling for nothing, waiting on us. She was seventeen and the reporter for her FFA chapter, and in May her livestock judging team had placed first at the state convention in Manhattan. That sends a team to nationals.

Nationals is in Indianapolis, the last week of October. Thousands of kids in blue jackets in one city. Hailey had been talking about it since she was a freshman, when she watched the older girls come home from it with their eyes lit up.

The chapter figured the trip at fourteen hundred a student. Airfare out of Wichita, four girls to a hotel room, registration, meals for five days, and the bus to the airport. The school covered part of it. The rest was on families.

We are not a family that has fourteen hundred dollars lying around. Randy farms with his cousin and drives a grain truck for the co-op in the fall. I cook at the elementary school. We do fine, but fine is a word that has to stretch.

So three years before, when Hailey was fourteen, we had started putting money back. Twenty here. Forty there. Her birthday money from my sister. The check from the 4-H steer she sold at the county fair the summer she was fifteen.

And we kept it at Gene’s.

People have asked me since why on earth we would do that. The honest answer is that it was his idea, and it was a good one at the time, and it came from love.