The Check I Wrote at the Feed Store

The counter

I stood in line behind Ward. Neither of us said anything. Somebody was talking about the price of hay, somebody else about a heifer that had calved early in the cold.

Tobe Halloran was there, a rancher who runs cows south of Sweetwater Creek. He is sixty-two and has been a widower ten years, and he says about one sentence a month. He was standing over by the coffee pot with his cup.

When Lamar got to the counter, Mavis rang up his ten sacks of range cubes and his salt. He pulled out his checkbook. And I stepped out of line.

I did not shout. I have never shouted at anybody in my life except a bull. I just said it plain, loud enough that the line could hear, because I wanted the line to hear.

“Lamar,” I said. “You owe Ward two thousand one hundred dollars for November, December and January.”

The store went quiet. It was the kind of quiet you can hear. The coffee pot gurgled. The wind worked at the tin roof. Somebody’s boot scraped on the concrete floor.

Lamar did not turn around. He kept his eyes on his checkbook. His neck went red above his collar.

“Cattle are down, Garnet,” he said. “Everybody in here knows cattle are down. Family can wait.”

He said it like it settled something. Like it was the most reasonable thing in the world.

Mavis

Mavis Dunagan is sixty-nine years old and about five foot nothing. She has buried a husband and a son, kept that store open through two droughts and a fire, and she has never in her life been in a hurry to say anything.

She looked at Lamar a long time. She did not say a word. She just took his check, rang him up, and handed him his receipt.

Then she looked past him at Ward, standing back in the line on his cane, and something in her face changed. I saw it. I think everybody in the line saw it.

Lamar picked up his receipt. He told the kid from the back to load his cubes. And then he had to walk out past every person in that line to get to the door.

Nobody said anything to him. Nobody had to. Men he had known his whole life looked at their boots, or at the feed sacks, or at nothing. One of the old men by the coffee pot shook his head, just once.

He went out the door and the wind slammed it behind him.