The Morning Every Tab Was Paid

I told Marcelle I had to run an errand, and I took the truck and went out on the ice.

His trailer sits at the end of a gravel road behind the cemetery, and I drove it at fifteen miles an hour with the chains on. When I came around the last bend, I could see the kerosene stove’s little red glow in the kitchen window.

He answered the door in his coat. He had not been sitting in the dark. He had been sitting at the table by the window with a cup of coffee, in a kitchen as clean as a surgeon’s table, with an oilcloth cover and a single chair pulled out and a flat carpenter’s pencil lying across a yellow legal pad.

He looked at me. I looked at the pencil.

“I wondered how long you’d take,” Toler Quave said.

I could not have said a word. I stood on his step in my good boots with ice running off my cap, and he stepped back and held the door.

“Well,” he said. “Come in out of that. I’ve got coffee.”

We sat at his table. A calendar from the Mount Zion church on the wall, a Bible on the shelf, a little radio tuned low to the ice report. A single cup in the drain rack. A single bowl.

I asked him why. It took me a while to get it out.

He turned his cup around in his hands, the way a man does when he has never told a thing out loud in his life and is deciding where to start.

“What do you remember about the winter of ‘sixty-two?” he said.

I was born in 1965. I told him so.

“No, I reckon you wouldn’t,” he said. “I was fifteen.”

In the fall of 1962, his father, Vester Quave, was working at the sawmill when a stack of green oak slid and broke his back in two places. He lay in a bed in the front room for five months, and the company check, which was supposed to come in November, did not come until March.

There was Toler, who was fifteen. There was a little sister, Ruby, who was six. There was his mother, Lurlene, who had never worked outside the house and did not know how to ask anybody for anything.

“We had about thirty dollars,” Toler said. “And she had a pride on her like a plank. When the church ladies brought a basket, she thanked them at the door and put it on the porch for the dogs and went on cooking beans. We ate beans from October to Christmas. I thought I’d never want to see a bean again.”

“What happened?”

“She went to your daddy.”

“She walked three miles to your store in December in a coat that wasn’t hers, and she stood by the register until it emptied out. She said, Mr. Brasfield, I have no money and two children and a husband in a bed. And your daddy never even looked up. He said, Lurlene, you’ll want flour and lard and some canned milk for the baby.”

“Ruby,” I said.

“She was six. She wasn’t a baby. But Mama said baby, and your daddy let her.” Toler’s mouth moved. “He wrote it in the book. I stood by the door and watched him write the number every single week, and I added it up in my head. I was good at figures. I knew what we owed.”

He stopped, and I did not rush him.