The Account I Kept Open Nine Falls

Troutt Brothers had two accounts on the elevator books, E. Troutt and G. Troutt, because Grover rented some ground of his own on the north end. With him gone, the account would have gone dormant by fall and the office girl would have closed it with a stamp.

“He’s not coming back to it,” Halbert said.

“Leave it open.”

“Why?”

I had no answer I could say out loud. What I had was the feeling of a man leaving a porch light on with no one expected. “Because it’s his,” I said, and I walked out.

Nine falls I kept that account open. Every October when a new manager tried to close it, I would walk in and say the same four words and pay the yearly service fee out of my own pocket, forty dollars. Nessa knew. Halbert knew. I never told myself why.

I think I was making a bargain. If I kept the door unlocked, I did not have to open it myself. A man can hold a position like that for a long time.

The cost came in small installments, like a bad loan. I paid the note in six years by selling the north ground. I hired a bookkeeper who never caught what Grover would have caught, and each time we lost money on something he would have seen coming, I put the thought in the drawer with the others.

Jolene married in the Lutheran church the summer of the fifth year. I walked her down the aisle with my jaw set so hard I cracked a molar. When I handed her over I looked at the second row on the groom’s side, where uncles sit. There was a place in it the width of one man. Everyone had left it empty without being asked.

That same summer my mother’s heart began to fail. At the very end, around four in the morning, she woke up and said Grover’s name clearly.

“He’s not here, Mom.”

“Send for him.”

“I don’t know where he is.”

That was a lie. I knew the name of the town.

She looked at me. It wasn’t an angry look. It was tired, like she had carried something a long way and just figured out she was going to have to set it down in the wrong place. “Then you made your bed,” she said.

She died at twenty to seven that morning. We buried her on a Saturday in the cemetery on the hill south of town with the whole county there and a wind strong enough to carry the pastor’s words to Nebraska. My brother was not among them.

I looked for him all through the service, at the back, along the fence, in the road. A man will always look for the one person he has made a point of not needing.

On Sunday morning I drove to the elevator, walked into the scale house, and said, “Is Grover’s account still open?”

“It’s open, Amos,” Halbert said.

“Good.”

That was how I mourned my mother and my brother, in one word, in a room that smelled of coffee and grease and wet dust.

So that is what I knew, standing in the wind that last Friday in October with the Peterbilt ticking as it cooled behind me.

The scale house had not changed in forty years. Same linoleum worn to black in a path to the counter, same percolator with its cord taped where a mouse had got at it. Through the big window my truck sat on the scale, waiting to be told what it weighed.