The Check I Wrote at the Feed Store

The counter, again

The first Saturday in March, I was back at the feed store. The line was long. Tobe was by the coffee pot. Ward was out in the lot loading mineral into his Ford.

Lamar came in. He did not get in line. He came straight to the counter where I was paying for my cubes, and he put an envelope down on the counter in front of me.

The store went quiet again, the same way it had a month before. But it was a different kind of quiet.

“That’s twenty-one hundred,” Lamar said. His voice was low. “Cash. It’s what I owed him. You paid it, so I’m paying you.”

I did not pick it up right away. I looked at him. He looked older than he had a month ago. He had not been sleeping. Jolene was right about that.

“I told myself family would wait,” he said, and he said it to me, but loud enough for the line, the same way I had said it to him. “I told myself he didn’t need it as bad as I did. That was a lie. I knew it was a lie when I said it.”

He turned around and looked out the front window, where Ward was lifting a sack of mineral into his truck, careful with that knee.

“I’m going to go tell him I’m sorry,” he said. “I don’t expect him to make it easy on me.”

“He will, though,” I said. “That’s the kind of man he is.”

Lamar nodded. He went out the door, and the whole line watched him walk across the lot to where Ward was standing by the blue Ford.

I could not hear what they said. I did not need to. Lamar talked and Ward listened, leaning on his cane. Then Ward put out his hand, and Lamar shook it, and held on a little longer than men usually do.

Mavis slid the envelope back toward me across the counter.

“Well,” she said. “That’s done.”

I picked it up and put it in my coat. I gave half of it to the church that Sunday and put the other half in a coffee can for Ward’s knee, for the day the VA finally gets around to fixing it right. He does not know about the coffee can yet. He will.

Spring

Ward rode in Buck’s branding in April, horseback in the pens on Sergeant, dragging calves to the fire like he had never been away from it. The young men worked the ground and Ward worked the rope, and he did not miss many.

Tobe Halloran gave him a raise in May without being asked. He said any man who could keep six windmills pumping through a dry spring was worth more than twenty an hour.

Lamar hired a young fellow out of Canadian to ride his fence, at fourteen dollars an hour, paid every two weeks. I heard he has never missed a payday. I believe it.

And Ward still rides my fence, every Monday and Tuesday, sixty miles of wire and every staple of it tight.

Some mornings I go out early just to watch him. He backs the Ford up to the corral, drops the tailgate, leads the gray horse alongside, and steps off into the saddle as easy as you please. Then he turns and rides out toward the north fence with the sun coming up gold behind him.

Ward rides my fence on a gray gelding named Sergeant.