The Morning Every Tab Was Paid

I had no answer for her that morning, and I would not for a long month more.

The harder question was what to say to thirty-eight families.

A tab is a private thing, and having it closed is private too. Nobody wants it announced from the church steps. Some folks would take it as the best news of their year, and some would take it as an insult, and I could not tell which was which by looking at the names.

Marcelle and I settled it the way we settle most things. I would tell each family myself, alone, when they came in, and I would tell them the truth. I did not know who had done it.

I had no idea how many ways that sentence could land.

Burdette Sumpter was my first. He comes at seven-fifteen with the portable oxygen on his shoulder and the clear tube across his cheeks, and he buys the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette and a half gallon of milk. He is eighty-three. He drove a log truck for the Lusk outfit for thirty-one years, and he walks into my store every morning like it is a church he owns a pew in.

“Put it on the book, Tilford,” he said, and set the milk on the counter.

“Burdette, step back here with me a minute.”

He looked at me, and I could see him decide I was about to ask him for money. His chin came up. He reached inside his flannel shirt and put a folded bill flat on the counter.

“I’ve got forty dollars for the first of the month,” he said. “I was going to bring it Friday.”

“It’s not that.”

I brought out the ledger and turned it face up, for the only time in my life in front of a customer, open to his page. The flat pencil line ran through it like a creek through a field. At the bottom, the one word.

He read it. I watched his lips move on it, the way an old man reads when he does not trust the print.

“That’s not mine,” he said.

“It’s yours, Burdette. I came in this morning and every page was like that.”

“Every page?”

“Every family on the book.”

He reached behind him, and I thought for a second he was going to fall, and I got a hand out. He was only looking for something to sit on. He sat down on a pallet of dog food in the middle of Aisle Two with the oxygen machine ticking on his shoulder, and he said nothing for the better part of a minute.

“I never took a handout in my life,” he said finally. “I paid for my daddy’s burying with a mule.”

“I know you did.”

“Some man I don’t know goes and does this to me.” His voice cracked in the middle of it, and he stopped and took a long breath through the tube. “Does he think I can’t carry it?”

“I don’t think that’s it, Burdette.”

“What is it, then?”

I told him the honest thing, which was that I did not know. Nobody had asked me for anything and nobody had left a name, and if I ever found out, I would tell him.

He looked at the forty dollars on the counter for a long time.

“I’m buying this milk,” he said. “Out of that. Keep the change for the next fella.”