The Jar on the Feed Store Counter

How the Jar Got Its Rules

My father opened Jerdee Feed and Seed on Main Street in 1961, across from the grain elevator, and I started sweeping the floor of it at nine years old. I took it over the year I turned fifty-two, after he passed, and by then I had stood behind that oak counter in one way or another for forty-three years. People come in for fifty pounds of layer pellets and stand there turning a seed cap in their hands, and you can see there is something heavier in the sack than pellets. A feed store counter is the nearest thing a small town has to a confessional, and the man behind it seldom knows what to do about that.

The first slip came from Lavon.

Lavon is seventy-eight now. She has kept the books at the store since I was a junior in high school, when my father hired her away from the bank because she was the only person in Stephens County who could make his ledger agree with itself. Fifteen years ago her husband was in the hospital in Oklahoma City for what turned out to be eleven weeks, and she came in on a Tuesday to place her order and could not get it out. She stood at the counter with her purse held in front of her in both hands. She tried twice. Then she put her hand over her mouth, and I understood that my job was to say nothing.

I pulled a feed ticket off the pad and slid it across with the pencil on the string.

“Write it down,” I said. “Just the name. You do not have to tell me anything. I will carry it.”

She wrote it. She folded it small and put it in the first jar I could find, which was the pickle jar my wife had sent over with a sandwich three days before, still sitting on the shelf behind the register. On Saturday I came in early, unfolded it, said her husband’s name, and prayed for him out loud in an empty store.

I never put up a sign. But people talk, and the next week there were two slips, and the next month there were nine. A farm wife whose sister had stopped speaking to her. A man who had been looking at the same bank letter for three weeks. A woman who wrote only “the baby,” and I prayed for the baby.

The rules came on their own, out of watching what made people drop a slip in and what made them stop.

The first rule is that it is only a name. No reason, no explanation. If a person wants to tell me the story, I will listen, and if they do not, I will not wonder aloud. I learned that in the second month, when I said to a woman, kindly, “Is Cody doing any better?” She stayed away for a year. A question is a toll booth. People will pay it if they have to, but they will take a different road if there is one.

The second rule is that I read them on Saturday morning alone, so nobody has to watch me hold their name. The third is that the slips are never read twice. When a Folgers can fills up, usually by Christmas, I put the lid on, write the year on it in marker, and set it on a shelf in the back office. There are fifteen cans on that shelf. It seemed wrong to throw away a name somebody had trusted me with.

The fourth rule is the one that mattered most, and it was Elsa who gave it to me, half as a joke, the first month. We were washing dishes, and I had told her about the nine slips.

“You are going to be tempted to figure out whose is whose,” she said. “Don’t. The day you start trying to solve those people, they will feel it, and the jar will be a dead thing on a counter.”

I gave her my word, and I kept it fifteen years. A name in my mouth on a Saturday morning was all anybody had asked of me, and it was all I gave, and it was plenty. A name, it turns out, is a very large thing to say out loud to God.