The Debt I Carried for Thirty-Four Years

The Bank Note

Now I have to tell you about my brother.

The summer of 1988 was the drought. You may remember it. The corn on our place stood eighteen inches high and curled like a fist, and in August Dad walked the rows with his hat in his hand and did not say a word for three days. We made thirty bushels to the acre on the north eighty. Dad had a note at the Quillan State Bank for eleven thousand four hundred dollars on the combine and the seed and the feed, and it came due on the first of March, 1989.

I was thirty-one. I had been on that place since the day I could carry a bucket. At supper on a Sunday in January, with the three of us at the table, because Loyd and Gaylen had both come out for dinner, Dad said the bank would likely have the north eighty by spring and perhaps the hogs. He said it in the voice he used for the price of corn. Then he got up and went out to the barn.

Mother put the pie on the table. She was in her middle fifties. She kept the books for the farm and had since 1955, in a green ledger in the pantry, and Dad never once looked in it. She cut the pie, and nobody said anything.

Gaylen was twenty-five. He had been carrying the mail for four years and made, I knew for a fact, about twenty thousand dollars a year before taxes. Five years before, in the machine shed, Dad had told him that the land could carry two sons and a third had better learn a trade. Gaylen had gone out and learned one. I thought he had been glad to go. I thought he had walked off our place clean.

What I did not know is that on the first Sunday of March, 1989, the fifth, at the sink in the pantry, my youngest brother put three twenty-dollar bills in my mother’s hand.

I know this because Mother told me, three years and eight months later. But I will tell you how it went, so you will know what I know.

Mother went to see Mr. Teasdale, the banker, who sat three pews up from us at the Quillan Christian Church. She asked him if the bank would take the note in weekly payments. He asked her where she would get the money. She said she had a source and that was all she would say. He looked at her over his glasses for a good while, and then he said that for Dorcas Rayburn, he would. Dad paid the interest himself every fall out of the hog check and took that for the whole of it. The rest was sixty dollars a week. It came to a hundred and ninety Sundays.

Every Sunday after dinner, while Dad was napping in his chair with the Quillan Record over his face and Loyd and I were out checking hogs, Gaylen went into the pantry to help Mother with the dishes. He put three twenty-dollar bills in her hand. She wrote a slip, in pencil, on a piece cut from a Quillan Farm Supply receipt pad, with the date and the amount and the letter G. She put the slip in a gray steel cash box that had belonged to her father and that lived on the shelf behind the flour tin. On Monday, when she went to town for groceries, she carried the cash to the bank. Dad thought she was carrying the hog money. She told him that was what she carried. And that is nearly the only lie I ever knew her to tell.

The hog market came back that spring, a little, and I took credit for it. I said at the feed store that we had come through on hogs. I said it so many times that I believed it.