The Last Vat at Pike Lick

The last vat

So I finished the vat.

I know how that sounds. But curd does not care who has confessed, and a vat left alone at ninety-nine degrees will go to leather as sure as it did in 1985.

I stirred, and slowly the room began to breathe again. A dozen of the old crew pulled on boots and hairnets and came to help, because nobody wanted to be left out of the last one.

Some would not look at me. Others did. Carol Satterfield got up from her lawn chair, took my wrist in her thin hand, and said nothing at all. It was the kindest thing anyone did for me that day.

At a quarter to three the curd was done. We drained the whey together, ten of us around a stainless vat the size of a pickup bed, and by five o’clock the last hoops were in the press.

The folding table

Before anyone went home, I asked Tamsin for a folding table.

She had them set it up on the dock, in the open, with the crew standing around and the last of the town still in the lot.

Carol had kept the old payroll papers in a shoebox for forty years, and she wrote the nine names out for me in her round hand. Then I put three things on the table.

The first was the Founders’ Knife. I gave it back to Tamsin with both hands. “It is not mine to cut with,” I said. She took it without a word.

The second was the plaque. I had driven it down that morning in the truck and had not told Lavada why. I laid it face down, because I could not stand to look at it, and I said, “Somebody can melt that.”

The third was my checkbook.

Delwin Ledbetter was standing at the end of the dock with his arms crossed. I wrote his check first, with every person there watching me do it.

It was for thirty-one thousand dollars, the difference between what he made on the milk route and what he made on the bread truck, nine years of it, as near as I could figure.

It was most of what Lavada and I had put by.

I walked it over and held it out. He did not take it. He looked at it, and at me, for what felt like a full minute.

“I’m not saying we’re square,” he said.

“No, sir.”

“I’ll cash it Monday.” He folded it once and put it in his shirt pocket. Then he went down the steps to his truck and did not look back, and I let him go.

I wrote seven more that afternoon, smaller, to the ones Carol could place. Tamsin said she would mail them in the morning. Two names nobody could find, and those I have been looking for since.

Lavada came out of the building when I was done. She had my coat over her arm. I stopped four feet from her, and I could not read her face.

“I’m sorry,” I said. “I should have told you in 1985.”

She held out the coat, and I took it, and she took my hand.

“I would have gone to Mr. Pruitt with you,” she said. “We would have eaten beans and lost the forty acres and been fine. Forty-one years you carried that by yourself. You fool.” Her voice shook. “Now let’s go find our son.”