The Check I Wrote at the Feed Store

Why I did not just call

Jolene and I talked it over that night at our own kitchen table. She wanted to call her brother. I understood that. He was her brother, and she was ashamed.

“He’ll tell you what he told Ward,” I said. “Cattle are down. Spring. He’ll mean it when he says it, too. He always does.”

“So we just let it go?”

“No,” I said. “But a phone call only buys one more promise. Ward has had three months of promises. He can’t put a promise on the counter at the drugstore.”

I thought about going out to Lamar’s place, but I knew how that would go. Two men in a barn, one of them embarrassed and the other one angry, and it would turn into something about her family and my family, and Ward would still not have his money.

I thought about the sheriff and the justice of the peace, the way some people would. But Ward would rather lose the money than file a paper against family. And I knew it would take months.

Jolene finally looked up at me. “What are you going to do?”

“I’m going to the feed store Saturday,” I said.

She knew exactly what I meant. She did not argue. She just reached across the table and put her hand over mine and held it a minute.

“He’s my brother,” she said. “But Ward is family too. You do what’s right, Garnet. I’ll stand by it.”

Saturday

If you have never been in a small-town feed store on a Saturday morning in ranch country, I do not know how to make you see it. It is the closest thing we have to a town square.

Mavis Dunagan has run hers for forty-one years, since her husband passed. It is a long tin building on the edge of town with a loading dock on the side, pallets of feed and mineral and salt blocks stacked to the rafters, and a coffee pot that has never once been empty.

On Saturdays the line at her counter runs from the register to the door. Ranchers, farm wives, kids buying show feed for their lambs, old men who do not need anything but come for the coffee and the cattle prices.

Everybody knows everybody. Everybody knows whose cows got out and whose wheat looks thin and whose granddaughter just had a baby. You can learn more about the county in thirty minutes in that line than in a year of reading the paper.

I got there at eight. Ward’s blue Ford was already in the lot, which I had counted on. He buys a sack of mineral for his old mare most Saturdays, regular as a clock.

He was standing in line about halfway back, leaning on his cane, in that old olive Army surplus jacket he has worn every winter since he came home. He nodded to me when I came in.

And three men ahead of him, near the front, was Lamar.

I had counted on that too. Lamar has bought his feed from Mavis every Saturday morning for as long as I have known him.