The Jar at the Elevator Scale

“The equipment fund was short,” he said. “I moved thirty-one hundred dollars out of it in April. Into the shop loan.

I had a payment due on the new roof, and Krista’s hours got cut at the clinic, and I thought, I’ll put it back after the soybean check.

I swear to you, Candice, I thought I’d have it back by August.”

“And the beans?”

“The beans didn’t pay what I figured. The price dropped, and the elevator took its discount.” He laughed, and it was an awful sound.

“And then the state association sent a notice that they’d be going through every volunteer department’s books this fall. A routine thing.”

“So you sold the tube.”

“I needed nine hundred dollars to cover the gap before they looked. That’s all. I was going to buy another one in the spring. I had it figured out.”

“Jason,” I said. “You were the first one through the door.”

He put the can down on the tailgate beside him, very carefully, as if it might break.

“I know what it was,” he said.

I want to be fair to him, because he did not make it easy for me to be anything else. He did not argue.

He said, “I know,” in the voice of a man who has been saying it to himself in the dark for three weeks.

None of that changed one thing about what he had done.

“Get it back,” I said.

“I can’t. It’s sold. I spent it on the roof.”

“Then I’ll find another way.”

“Candice.” He lifted his head. His eyes were red. “Don’t tell Mom. Please. Let me tell her. Let me fix it first.”

“You’ve had three weeks to fix it,” I said.

I got back in my car and drove home with both hands on the wheel.

I did not sleep much that night.

At a quarter to three I went down to the kitchen and sat at the table with a calculator and a stack of feed-store envelopes. I am the school secretary.

One tube was twelve hundred dollars. That was the easy number. The harder one was that a department with a single tube covering three townships waits on a borrowed one the first night two men are in two bins.

So I wrote $2,400 on the back of an envelope, and I circled it twice.

In the morning, I called the supplier in Nebraska from the school office during my planning period. A woman named Patty took the call, and she said she could ship within five business days of the order.

That afternoon I called Galen and told him what I wanted to do.

I had been thinking about it for a day. I did not want to go to the board.

I wanted to ask the farmers. The people who actually have bins. The people who would be the next man in the hole.

“There’s one place every one of them goes in the first week of October,” I told Galen. “Haverly Farmers Co-op. The scale.”

Galen was quiet. I could hear a tractor running behind him.

“Every check made out to the department,” I said. “Not to me. I’ll never touch a dollar. You count it. You deposit it. I just want to sit there.”