The Debt I Carried for Thirty-Four Years

What Mother Said

On the first of November, 1992, a Sunday, after dinner, Mother sent me to the pantry for a jar of pickled beets. I was thirty-four. I reached behind the flour tin, where the beets were not, and my hand closed on something cold with a handle.

I took it down. The lid had a dent in one corner. I opened it, and it was full to the top with little slips of paper, cut square, a hundred and ninety of them, each one in my mother’s pencil. G. $60. Mar 5 ’89. G. $60. Mar 12 ’89. And on down. A summer of them. A winter of them. One for Christmas Eve, which fell on a Sunday that year. Three Easters. The last one on top, in capital letters, said October 18, 1992, PAID, and under it, smaller, Not a word to Orval.

I stood in my mother’s pantry with eleven thousand four hundred dollars in my hands, in slips of paper, and I understood in about four seconds what had saved our farm. It was not the hogs.

Mother was in the door behind me. She had not made a sound. She said, “Put the lid down, Verlin.”

I put it down.

She said, “Your brother asked me, and I gave him my word. Now I have given it to you.” She wiped her hands on her apron, the way she did before she said something that mattered. “Your father would take it from the bank. He would not take it from a boy he told to go and learn a trade. Gaylen knows that. He wanted it to be a thing that nobody had to thank him for.”

I asked her why she was telling me.

She said, “Because you are going to have the place, and you ought to know whose hands are in it.”

Then she took the jar of beets off the shelf where it had been the whole time, put it in my arms and went back to the kitchen.

I want you to know what I felt, because it was not what a good man would feel. I wish I could say gratitude. It came later. What came first was shame, and it came hot and fast, and under it, so quick that I did not catch it, something meaner. I had worked that ground for fourteen years beside my father. I had believed, God help me, that I was the one who stayed. I was the one who kept the place alive. And in about four seconds, I found out that the baby of the family, the one who had been sent off to carry other people’s mail, had paid for the whole thing by the week, out of a mail carrier’s check, and had never once asked for credit.

I could not stand it. I could not stand to owe it. A man like me can owe the bank, he can owe the feed store, but I did not know how to owe my brother.

So I did what I do. I said nothing.