The Check I Wrote at the Feed Store

The man on the dock

Up on the loading dock, two ranchers in hats had watched the whole thing. One of them was Buck, a cowman who leases grass on the county line. The other was Tobe Halloran.

Tobe had his coffee cup. He looked down at Ward a long minute. Then he set the cup on top of a pallet of feed sacks, came down the dock steps, slow and careful, and walked straight across the gravel to us.

He did not look at me. He looked at Ward.

“You know anything about windmills, son?”

Ward blinked. “Some. My granddad had two.”

“I’ve got six,” Tobe said. “On the south place. Somebody needs to check them twice a week, grease them, pull a rod when one quits. My boy moved to Lubbock. I’m too old to climb.”

“I can’t climb much either,” Ward said, and he tapped his knee.

“Don’t need to climb to see if a tank’s going dry,” Tobe said. “And when one needs pulling, I’ll send a man with you. Twenty an hour. You can start Wednesday, if Garnet can spare you.”

Ward looked at me. I just nodded. I could not have said anything if I tried.

“Wednesday,” Ward said.

Tobe put out his hand and Ward shook it. Then Tobe went back up the dock steps, picked up his coffee, and went back inside like nothing had happened.

Buck

Buck was still standing on the dock. He is a big man, about fifty, with a voice like a gravel truck.

“I’ll be branding the second week of April,” he said. “I always need a man horseback in the pens. Day wages. You come if you can.”

“I’ll come,” Ward said.

One of the farm wives who had come out to the dock, a woman I knew from church, called down that her husband needed somebody to help him run cattle through the chute for shots in March. Ward said he would come for that too.

By the time we went back inside, Ward had more work lined up than he had had since he came home from the Army. And none of it was charity. Every bit of it was work those people needed done.

Mavis had his sack of mineral waiting at the counter. She would not take his money for it.

“Not today, honey,” she said. “Today it’s on the house.”

He started to argue, and she looked at him over the register the way she must have looked at her own boy when he was small, and he stopped.