The Last Vat at Pike Lick

What I said

I did not go to the microphone. I did not want to leave the vat. I told Tamsin I would speak from where I stood, and she held the mic out to me with a puzzled little smile.

It was heavier than I expected. My mouth had gone completely dry. I looked at Lavada first, because she deserved it first. She was smiling at me, proud.

I said, “Thank you, Tamsin. I can’t take the knife.”

There was a small laugh, a kind one, the sort you give a modest man.

“I mean it,” I said. “I have to tell you all something, and I have to say it plain. My wife has not heard it. My children have not.”

The laughter stopped. In the back somebody’s baby started up and got hushed.

“In January of 1985, we lost a vat of Colby in this room. Ten thousand pounds.

It put a short truck on the dock for Louisville, and the contract went with it, and nine people lost their jobs that spring. Some of you were those people.”

I could see Delwin Ledbetter by then, near the dock door in a feed cap, with his arms crossed. He had gone completely still.

“You were told it was Cyrus Gentry’s doing,” I said. “He was fired that morning and run out of this county. I want every one of you to hear me say this. It was not Cyrus. It was me.”

You could have heard a hairnet drop.

“I had the vat. I set the steam. I was thirty-one and worn clean out, and I got in my truck to get my jacket, and I fell asleep.

I woke up at twenty past four with the curd cooked to a hundred and thirty-one. Cyrus was already here. He was the one who threw the steam off.

He was the one trying to save it with his bare hands.”

I made myself look at Lavada. Her face had gone very white, but she had not moved.

“When Mr. Pruitt asked who had the vat, I stood there and said nothing. Cyrus looked at me, and he said it was him.

And later I told Leland, to his face and in Cyrus’s, that I had left the vat at ninety-eight and gone to take a phone call. That was a lie.

I told it so I would keep my job.

I let a man who had covered more of my shifts than I can count carry the whole thing out the door in a white coat, and I let his little girl take it at school.”

My voice broke on that, and I let it.

“Delwin, you lost your milk route because of me. The rest of you who got laid off that spring, I did that.

I owe every one of you more than I can pay, and I am going to spend whatever time I have figuring out what. I have a plaque at home that says I never lost a batch.

It is the biggest lie in Pike Lick.”

Nobody moved. I could see Truett at the rope with his daughter on his hip, and his face was a stranger’s. I understood I might have just lost my family’s good opinion and every friend I had.

I felt as light as a man who has set down a sack of feed after carrying it up a hill for forty years. I also felt sick to my stomach. Both at once.

I turned to the back of the room.

“Billie Gentry,” I said. “I did not know you were here. Your father paid for what I did, and then you paid, and I never came to say so. I am not asking you to forgive me.

I do not think I have the right. I am telling you, in front of the people who believed it, that Cyrus did not lose that contract. I did.

And that he was the best man I ever worked with.”

Then I lowered the microphone, because I had nothing else.