The Debt I Carried for Thirty-Four Years

Eight Sundays

I did not take my plate down. The plate said the true thing about what I had done, and Gaylen’s said the other one, and the two of them side by side on a cedar post looked more like the family than anything I had ever put in that grove.

I will tell you how I spent eight Sundays.

On the ninth of September, Loyd called him. I had told Loyd what I’d done, because a man has to tell someone, and Loyd said, “You sent me that proof and I signed it, and I’m going to call him.” Loyd is a better man than I am. He always was. I have said that to nobody but Irma.

I finished the corn on the twenty-second of October. It ran sixty bushels better on the north eighty than it had any year since the drought, and I stood in the field at dusk with the combine ticking, and I thought, that is the ground that he bought. I knew that every harvest. I had never once said it.

On Saturday, the thirty-first, I told Irma the whole of it. I told her in the kitchen after supper, with the dishes still in the sink, the box and the slips and Mother in the door and the thirty-four years. I had never told her. I had never told anyone. She sat very still and listened to the end.

Then she said, “Tomorrow’s the first of November.”

I said I knew.

“Thirty-four years to the day, Verlin.”

I said I knew that, too. I had been counting.

She said, “Then you’ll take it to him tomorrow. Take your coat. I’ll sit in the truck.”

I said I could not ask her to sit in a truck in the dark.

She said, “Verlin, I have sat in rooms for twenty years while we said that woman’s name wrong. I can sit in a truck for ten minutes.”

That night I opened the box. I read every slip, Mar 5 ’89 all the way to Oct 18 ’92, and on every one the little G. in Mother’s hand. On nineteen of them, in the margin, was a tiny cross, the kind she made in the corner of a letter when she said a prayer for the person it was about. A cross on the Sundays he must have looked thin or tired. She had been praying over that boy for a hundred and ninety Sundays, and I had been in the next room.

I put an envelope on top of the slips. In it was a check for eleven thousand four hundred dollars, which is the sum and not the debt. I know the difference. I wrote nothing with it. I had said too many words already.