The Check I Wrote at the Feed Store

The promise

Ward told me most of this later, a piece at a time, and only because I made him.

The first Friday in November, Lamar met him at the barn and said cattle were down. Prices had dropped hard that fall, which was true. Everybody in the county was feeling it.

“I’ll catch you up when the yearlings sell,” Lamar told him. “January. You know I’m good for it. We’re family.”

Ward said all right. Ward always says all right.

He rode the fence through November. He rode it through December, through the week before Christmas when it was nine degrees with a wind that would take the skin off your face. He rode it through the first three weeks of January.

The yearlings sold the third week of January. Ward heard about it from a trucker at the gas station who had hauled them to the sale barn. Good weights, the trucker said. Decent money, considering.

Ward waited a week. Then he asked.

“Things are tight,” Lamar told him. “I had a note come due on the bank. You’ll get it, Ward. Spring. Family can wait a little.”

That was when Ward quit. Not with any noise. He just did not show up the next Tuesday, and Lamar never called to ask why.

By my figuring, and later by Ward’s own notebook, where he wrote down every day and every hour like the Army taught him, it came to 210 hours over three months. Two thousand one hundred dollars.

The kitchen table

I drove out to Ward’s place the next morning, a Sunday after church. He rents a little frame house on a quarter section east of town, with a set of pens and an old barn where he keeps his saddle and the one horse he owns, a sorrel mare too old to ride much.

He was out in the pens breaking ice on the water trough with a hammer when I pulled up. The sun was out and the sky was that hard winter blue you only get after a front blows through.

“You lost?” he said.

“Jolene saw you at the drugstore.”

He hit the ice one more time. Then he set the hammer on the fence post and looked at me. He knew there was no use pretending.

We went inside and sat at his kitchen table. He made coffee in a pot that should have been thrown out ten years ago. I asked him straight out, and he told me straight out, because that is how we were raised.

“I don’t want you in the middle of it, Garnet,” he said. “He’s Jolene’s brother. It’s my business.”

“It’s eleven dollars at a drugstore counter,” I said. “That’s my business too.”

He turned his cup around in his hands. “I’ll get it in the spring. Or I won’t. Either way, I’m not going to go beg him.”

That was the whole thing right there. Ward would never ask Lamar for that money a second time. A man who had been through what he had been through was not going to stand on another man’s porch with his hat in his hand.

And a man who served his country should not have to.