I had always thought I knew why Wayne stayed away from Pleasant Grove. Lorraine’s funeral was there, three years ago in March, and I figured the building held more than he could stand.
I was only half right. I would learn the other half in December, from the man himself, standing in the mud.
The second Saturday brought Bud Rader.
Bud is seventy-one years old and has sold calves at that barn since he was a boy running behind his daddy. He wears his good straw hat to sale day, the one his wife used to brush off for church, and he keeps a bad hip so private that he will not let a man hold a door.
He walked up to the stand slow. Glenda poured his cider without a word, like a bartender who knew the order.
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He gave her a dollar, and then he slid a five-dollar bill into the can.
“Keep the change, young lady.”
“It’s a dollar, sir,” Glenda said.
“Not today it ain’t.”
“But it’s a dollar. That’s what my sign says.” She pointed at the cardboard she had lettered herself and propped against the cooler.
Bud took off his hat. I had never seen him take it off for anyone but the dead.
“Miss,” he said, “my wife taught Sunday school at Pleasant Grove for thirty-one years. She’d get a kick out of this. You keep that five.”
Glenda took the five. She said thank you, and she did not cry, because she is a Tate on one side and a Hart on the other, and neither side wastes it.
I looked down at the ground until it passed.
Men talk at a sale barn. By the third Saturday, there were seven cattlemen in line at ten to seven. By the fourth there were twenty, and a few of them had brought their wives.
A hauler from Barry County, a big quiet man with chapped lips, put a twenty in the can on the first Saturday he saw her and came back the next three weeks with his brother.
A woman who raised goats up near Golden City sent a jar of her own apple butter. She wrote on the lid, For the roof girl.
Glenda wrote every Saturday’s take in pencil on the lid of the coffee can, small and neat, like a bookkeeper. $64. $131. $240. $312.
The week it dropped to $198, the first sleet came, and I thought she would want to quit.
It was nineteen degrees. The cider froze at the spigot until I wrapped it in a moving blanket. Glenda’s hands were so cold she could not feel the cups.
I said, “You can stay in the truck, baby. I’ll pour.”
“No, ma’am,” Glenda said. She lifted her chin at me. “It’s my stand.”
So I let her. She poured with her mittens on, spilling a little on every cup, and the men drank it anyway and told her it was the best they ever had.
Gene Albrecht brought out a space heater and ran an orange cord all the way from the office, forty feet across the mud, and said not to tell the insurance man.