The forty years
People ask how a man lives with something like this. The honest answer is that I lived with it very well, for a long time, and that is the worst of it.
For the first year I thought about it every hour. For the second year, every day. Then it turned into a rock in the shoe that you quit noticing because the foot grows around it.
Our son Truett was born in March, healthy and loud. Lavada and I paid off the forty acres in nineteen years. I made foreman after Leland retired.
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I trained a hundred young people to read a thermometer, and I made every one of them check the steam twice, then a third time, then initial it. I told them I had a habit.
I never told them where I got it.
I gave to the fire hall and the church roof. I sat on the school board. I was buying something with every check, and what I was buying was the right to keep sitting where I sat.
Twice I tried to do the right thing. In 1993 I looked up an address and drove to Hamilton, Ohio, and parked across from a small yellow house with a basketball hoop over the garage.
I sat there two hours with the engine running. A girl of about sixteen came out with Cyrus’s long face and bounced a ball against the garage door, and I watched her.
Then the front door opened and a tall man in a work shirt called her in to supper. I put the truck in gear and drove two hundred and fifty miles home without stopping.
I was not a monster. I was a frightened man who got comfortable.
Every year made the confession cost more, not less, and every year I told myself he had surely moved on, that dragging it up would only hurt more people than it helped.
That is exactly the story a coward tells. It always sounds like mercy.
And all the while, on the shelf above my television, sat a plaque that said I had given the creamery forty years without a lost batch.