The Account I Kept Open Nine Falls

Dray Prairie had turned out in the meeting room above the scale house. Folding tables, a banner drawn in six colors of marker, a sheet cake with a blue frosting truck scale on it. Marlys Ostrander sat in the corner in a navy dress with her cane hooked on her chair. She was eighty.

Ivar had been in the cemetery three years. Her son Kjell stood behind her with his arms folded. Obert Sundby read a poem, rhymed all the way through, and the best line was “He never docked a friend.”

Then there was a pause where somebody was supposed to hand him a gift, and I stood up. It was like carrying a full bucket and finding your arm has stopped being yours. Nessa’s hand was on my back.

“I need a minute,” I said.

A hundred and ten faces turned. I held onto the back of a seat.

“The story in this town for nine years is that Grover Troutt put in the wrong seed and cost five families a year. I let that be the story. It’s wrong. It was my seed. I sat with the salesman. I wanted the big yield.

“I drove to your kitchens, Obert, Ray, Lindy, Marlys, and I said I would not steer you wrong. Then I told my brother to call Halbert because I had hay down. He argued at that counter for an hour. He signed his own name on the slip.

“And on the Thursday after the frost he walked into this building and told you it was his doing, so you wouldn’t come for me. And I was at the bank, and then I went home and let you.

“He came to my house that night to tell me what he’d done, and I wouldn’t let him speak. I told him he’d cost us everything.

“For nine years my brother has driven seven hundred miles every Thanksgiving weekend, in the dark, and paid off every note you owed this co-op out of his own wages. Ninety thousand dollars in cash, ten thousand every year.

“The Ostranders kept their home quarter because of a man in a rented house with a space heater. I’m not asking for anything. I wanted you to know whose name goes on it. It goes on mine. I’m driving to Montana tonight to say it to him.”

I sat down because my legs quit.

Nobody moved. The fluorescent tube over the cake buzzed. Ray Fadness began, “Amos, nobody here needs you to-“

“Sit down, Ray.”

Marlys had not raised her voice. She pushed herself up on the cane, waving off Kjell, a small bent woman who had once stood in this same building and asked who put her in that seed.

“I said terrible things to that boy in the parking lot,” she said. “I’ll tell you the honest truth, Amos Troutt. If you had stood up that Thursday, I’d have hated you the rest of my life.

“I’d have been wrong to spend it that way, and I’d have been right to be angry, and I don’t know which one God wanted. I only know that boy took it off me and then he paid for it.” She turned slowly.

“I have thanked the Lord every night for nine years for the money that kept my house. I just had the wrong man’s name in my prayers.”

In the back, Obert began to cry with the poem in his fist. “We all did,” said Lindy Haugen.