The Ledgers Behind The Grain Hauling Sale

The week of questions

Monday was the bank holiday, and the whole day was quiet. Curt and I drove to Kearney to take Brooklyn to lunch at her nursing school.

I told her the whole thing over a basket of fries, and she put down her fork and cried in the booth, and then she laughed.

On Wednesday morning Paulette Pruett drove out to Holdrege with a laptop and a thermos of coffee, and we set up in Mama’s dining room, because my own house, she said, had too much of me in it.

I thought she meant the totes. She meant the kitchen table.

We worked for six days, in the evenings and on the weekend, around my hours at the bank. I want to say how it felt, because it was not what I expected.

I thought it would feel like a trial. It felt more like walking a friend through a house I had lived in for nineteen years, opening the cupboards, and showing her where everything was.

On the Tuesday of the second week, Troy came to the house. I did not know he was coming.

He parked his pickup at the curb and sat in it for ten minutes with the engine off, and then he walked up to the door and knocked like a salesman.

I let him in. He stood in my kitchen in his work jacket, turning his cap in his hands. He looked at the table, and then at me. “Craig called,” he said.

“He told me the Fisk thing, that it’s eight thousand four hundred that comes off. And he said the rest of the forty is waiting on you.”

“It’s waiting on Paulette,” I said.

“It’s on you, Sis. She told him so.” He swallowed. “I owe a note at the bank on the two newest trailers. It’s thirty-one thousand and it is due the first of the month.

If the wire doesn’t come before then, I’m in trouble.”

I looked at him. I thought about the thirty-one thousand and the gift card and the index card I had carried to the yard in 2014. I thought about Dad, tapping twice on the blanket.

“Troy, I will tell you what I told you in the parking lot,” I said. “I am not going to slow this down.

I am not going to speed it up either, to be kind, and I am not going to take a dime for it. Paulette finishes when she finishes.”

“Will you ask her to hurry?”

“I will answer her questions the day she asks them,” I said. “That is what I have done all week. That is all I know how to do.”

He nodded slowly. He put his cap back on. At the door he turned and said, “Do you hate me?”

I thought about it, because I try to be honest with that question. “No,” I said. “I am tired of you. That is not the same thing.”

He went down the steps with his head bent.

I watched him get into the truck, and I watched him sit there another minute with his hands on the wheel, and then he drove away.

I did not cry until the truck was out of sight, and then I cried at my own kitchen table for about ten minutes, and it was fine.

What came off, and what came through

The wire came on Friday, October 23rd, at 1:15 in the afternoon. Paulette told me later that Craig held the phone against his ear for a full minute before he said to release it.

He said he was not angry at Troy. He said he just wanted to be sure.

The amount was $31,600. The $8,400 from the Fisk credit had come off, exactly as Craig said it would.

The sale came to $631,600 in the end, not $640,000. The wire covered his trailer note with $600 to spare, and left nothing over for the boat.

Arlen Fisk himself called Craig the Wednesday before and confirmed the credit, and added, in his flat farmer’s way, that he was surprised anybody had remembered.