The Old Picker That Beat the Storm

The check comes back

Lamar stood there a long time. Then he walked to the counter. The drivers moved aside to let him through.

He laid his hat down on the counter, and he reached into his shirt pocket and took out his checkbook.

He wrote standing up, leaning over the counter. His hand was not steady.

When he finished, he tore the check out carefully along the perforation and held it out to me across the counter.

It was made out to Hoyt and Lorna Pickett. Nine thousand dollars even.

“I took your money,” he said. He said it loud enough for the room. “I took it, and I didn’t earn it, and I left y’all to the weather.”

I looked at the check. I looked at him. He was an old man standing in a room full of men he had known all his life, and he was ashamed, and he was not hiding from it.

I took it. I did not say anything clever. There was nothing clever to say.

“Thank you, Lamar,” I said.

“Is Inez all right?” he asked. “Did her sixty come in?”

“The last row of it came off at half past six,” I said. “She watched from the porch.”

He nodded. He picked up his hat and turned it in his hands. “I’d like to go by and see her,” he said. “If that’s all right.”

“That’s between you and her,” I said. “But her door’s never been locked.”

He went out. The drivers went back to their coffee. Ardith slid my grade sheet across the counter to me and winked over the top of her glasses, and that was all.

Inez’s porch

Lamar went to see Inez that afternoon between rain bands. I was in my kitchen and I watched his truck pull up her drive.

He sat in it for a minute before he got out.

I did not go over. It was not my business. But Inez told me about it the next morning, sitting at my table with her coffee.

“He cried,” she said. “Sat right there on my porch swing and cried like a boy. Said he was scared. Said his whole life he never once finished a crop with nothing to show, and he couldn’t stand for this one to be the one.”

“What did you tell him?”

“I told him his brother would have picked ours first and his own in the rain,” Inez said. “And then I told him I forgave him. Because I’m too old to carry it, and so is he.”

She sipped her coffee. “He lost about forty acres to the rain,” she said. “Did you know that?”

“I heard.”

“I’m sorry for it,” she said. “I truly am. But I’m not sorry the Lord let it be his and not ours.”

I had to laugh a little at that, and so did she.