The Account I Kept Open Nine Falls

Halbert poured two cups and sat down across from me in the metal chair where farmers had argued about moisture discounts for fifty years. He did not sit behind the counter.

“I’m done after today,” he said. “I buried my brother Alden in March. We were on good terms right to the end, and I still found a hundred things I’d never said to him. I stood at that casket and thought, well, you two had it easy. You never had to go nine years without a word.”

“Halbert.”

“I’m going to tell you something I gave my word I wouldn’t. Your brother made me swear. He said if it ever came out, it had to be because you asked him straight. You never asked.” He looked at me over the glasses. “I stopped waiting.”

I said, “Tell me.”

“The Tuesday you sent him to the phone, he called and read me the order. Four hundred bags of the long hybrid. I said, Grover, on the creek bottom? That bottom holds cold air like a bowl. He said, I know, Halbert. I told him.

“He came in the next morning in person and stood right there at the counter, turning a seed tag over and over like a man at a graveside. He asked me what happens in a cold September. I told him the worst. He asked if the seed company would take the order back. I said the group price held only if all four hundred bags went through.

“He said, ‘Amos gave his word to five kitchens. If I pull this, my brother never forgives me, and this town never forgives my brother. A handshake in this county doesn’t come untied.’ You know he’s right about that.”

I did. God help me, I did.

“So he signed the slip himself. Placed by G. Troutt. I asked why he’d put his own name on what you wanted. And he said, ‘If it goes bad, Halbert, it goes on me.’ I thought it was a figure of speech. I did not know I was hearing a plan.”

The coffee had a skin on it. I looked at the skin.

“The Thursday after the frost, the five of them came into this room with their tickets in their fists. Obert slammed his cap on the counter. Lindy was crying and trying not to. Marlys stood in the middle of the floor with her purse clamped under one arm and said, ‘Who put us into that seed?’

“I had my mouth open, Amos. Your name was on the front of my tongue. And the door banged, and your brother walked in. You were at the bank in Mitchell trying to get an extension. He walked into the middle of that floor like a man testing ice to see if it would hold somebody else.

“He said, ‘It was me. I picked the hybrid. I made the call. I told my brother it’d be fine, and he trusted his little brother with the phone, and that’s the only thing he’s guilty of. Come at me.’

“And they did. Not with fists. They stood in the lot and said what a town says, and he stood in that doorway and took every word like a man paid by the pound.”

I could not feel my hands.