The Jar at the Elevator Scale

“Candice,” Galen said. “You do realize you’re going to embarrass Jason in front of the whole county.”

“I’m not going to say his name,” I said. “I’m going to put out a picture of Bryan.”

Galen cleared his throat twice.

“I’ll bring the receipt book,” he said.

The co-op manager is a man named Ken Rowe, who has run the scale house for twenty years and who plays the organ at the Methodist church on the weeks the regular organist has her knees done.

I walked into his office on Thursday with my hospital photo in a folder, and I did not get a sentence out before he opened it.

It was a picture I took myself, two years before, the second night.

Bryan was in the bed in a gown, gray in the face, with the oxygen tube taped across his cheek and a purple bruise visible over the collar.

Ken looked at it for a long time. Then he took off his glasses and rubbed his eyes.

“Take the good spot,” he said. “Right beside the scale house. I’ll have Alyssa put a cone out so nobody parks on you.”

“I don’t want any special treatment.”

“It isn’t special treatment. It’s a fire department. Take the spot.”

I spent Friday night washing the biggest pickle jar from my pantry.

It had held dills for the church supper and it still smelled faintly of garlic, and I washed it three times and left it upside down on a dish towel to dry.

Reagan made me a sign on a sheet of white poster board with a purple marker, because it was the only one that still had ink, and she wrote the letters one at a time with her tongue between her teeth.

Two tubes, it said, with the T’s tilted. And underneath, in my careful school-secretary hand: Checks to Haverly Fire Department.

I looked at it for a minute. It was not professional. It was exactly right.

Saturday, October third, came in cold and clear. Haverly was golden and gray. The soybeans were out and the corn was coming off, and every road in the county had a combine on it.

I set up the folding table beside the scale house, in the place Ken had cleared.

I put the jar on it, and I taped Bryan’s photo beside the jar with duct tape, and I propped Reagan’s sign against a coffee can full of pens.

Galen had come at six-thirty with the receipt book and a lockbox, and he sat on an upturned bucket with his arms crossed and said nothing.

Bryan drove us there. He parked the pickup facing the scale and turned off the engine, and then he sat with both hands on the wheel and did not get out.

“I can’t do it, Candi,” he said.

“You don’t have to do anything.”

“They’re going to look at that picture and then they’re going to look at me.” His jaw worked.

“I can’t stand there and have them look at me and think, there’s the guy who walked out onto the crust. They pulled me out of a hole.

I can’t turn around and ask them for money.”

“You aren’t asking,” I said. “I am. Just sit here.”

He sat. I got out and went to stand beside my table, with my coat zipped to my chin and my hands in my pockets.