Forty Alumni and One Blue Jacket

Marge asks

On Monday morning I went to the feed store for another sack of mineral, because the one I dropped on Saturday had never gotten opened. I did not mean to say anything about it. I am not that kind of woman.

Marge Larkin has run the counter at Tripp County Farm and Ranch Supply for thirty years. She is seventy-one, with gray hair pulled back in a ponytail and a charcoal fleece vest she wears from September until the day the snow quits, and she knows every family in three counties by their feed order.

She was chapter president in 1973. She has the old photograph behind the register, a row of kids in blue jackets squinting into the sun in front of a Quonset hut.

“You look like you’ve been dragged behind something,” Marge said, ringing me up.

“Rough weekend.”

“Josie all right?”

I’d told myself I would not do it. But Marge has a way of asking a question and then simply waiting, with her pencil behind her ear, until the answer comes out on its own.

So I told her. Not the way I am telling you now. I told it in about six flat sentences, the burn barrel and the zipper pull and the contest on Saturday.

Marge put down her pencil.

“No,” she said. “Hand me that phone.”

I lifted the receiver off the wall, a beige thing with a long curly cord that has hung there since before Josie was born, and gave it to her.

“Marge, you don’t have to.”

“Phoebe Petrie.” She was already dialing. “When your mother’s tractor went through the ice in ’94, forty people showed up to pull it out, and I don’t recall that she asked. Go sit down.”

The phone tree

I learned that afternoon that the Tripp County FFA Alumni has a phone tree. It is a laminated sheet of paper, kept in a folder under Marge’s cash drawer, with names and numbers going back to the 1970s, each person responsible for calling three others.

It had not been used since the old ag teacher, Arlen Gerber, retired six years ago. Marge said she was not sure it still worked.

It still worked.

By Tuesday noon my own phone would not stop ringing. A man from Mellette County whom I had never met in my life, who ran three thousand acres and spoke like he had a mouthful of gravel, said he had a granddaughter who wore a jacket like that.

A woman from Gregory called next. She had Arlen Gerber for an advisor, same as me, and she cried a little on the line.

Josie came in from school that afternoon and found me at the kitchen table, taking the fourth call of the hour with a pencil behind my ear. She stood in the door with her backpack hanging off one arm.

“Who is that?” she whispered.

“A man named Lowell. Class of 1983.” I covered the phone. “He wants to know your jacket size.”

“My what?”

“They’re taking up a collection, honey. Marge started a phone tree.”

Josie sat down at the table slowly. She looked at the pad where I had been writing, the names and the amounts, and she put one finger on the page.

By evening, forty people had called, mailed or dropped something by Marge’s counter. There was four hundred and twelve dollars in an envelope, in fives and tens and twenties and one check for fifty.

Four hundred and twelve dollars to replace a ninety dollar jacket, though of course they did not know that when they started giving. It simply seemed to be the thing to do.