The Morning Every Tab Was Paid

I opened a new page in the ledger and wrote Whoever Needs It across the top, and by Christmas the drawer held four hundred and ten dollars.

What I did not tell anybody was that it was eating me alive.

A man who has spent fifty years being the one who gives credit does not know what to do when somebody gives it to him. I was grateful. But under the gratitude was the same thing I had seen on Burdette Sumpter’s face. Who was he, to see what I could not carry? How had he known?

I lay awake. Marcelle did too, with her back to me, and I knew by the sound of her breathing.

The cold came the first week of December, and it came with ice.

It came on a Monday night, a freezing rain that coated every wire and every limb in the county, and by Tuesday morning the power was out from Harlow to the river. I ran the generator out the loading dock door to keep the milk case cold, and I opened at six because I knew who would come.

They came. Folks walked in with their coats buttoned to their chins and their breath smoking, and I handed out coffee from the deli pot, and nobody asked for the book. Half the town stood around the heater in the back corner, telling each other whose pipes had frozen.

And then I noticed who was not there.

Toler Quave has come into my store every Tuesday at ten minutes to seven for the twenty-one years since he retired. He is seventy-nine. He lives in a single-wide trailer behind the Mount Zion cemetery, where he mows the grass for fifty dollars a month, and he retired from the county road department after thirty-one years on the same grader.

He buys the same six dollars and eighty-four cents of groceries every week of his life. A can of Vienna sausages, a sleeve of saltines, a dozen eggs, a quarter pound of bologna. He pays in quarters, counted out one at a time on the glass.

He wears the same canvas coat, with the elbows patched. He is the quietest man in Pine Flat, and I do not think I have heard him say forty words in a row.

In twenty-one years he had never missed a Tuesday.

I stood at the register with the generator rattling out back, and I thought of the one thing he had said to me in October, and everything on that office wall began to move.

He had set his quarters on the glass, and then, looking at the bread rack instead of at me, he had said, “How many families you carrying on that book, Tilford?”

I laughed it off. I said thirty-eight, and wasn’t it a shame. He said, “Winter’s coming,” and picked up his bag, and left.

I had not thought about it once since. He was the only man in Pine Flat over seventy who had never run a tab with me, even in years when I could see he needed to. I had always taken that for pride, and never thought about it again.

A grader operator carries a flat pencil to tally loads. A grader operator ties down a load with a trucker’s hitch. A man in a single-wide behind a graveyard heats it with kerosene and keeps his money in a cedar chest.

Everybody in Pine Flat had looked at Toler Quave for sixty years and seen a poor old man.