The Daughter Who Cleared My Name

The bailiff called the room to order, and I sat at the defense table with my hands folded so tight my knuckles had gone white, and I did not expect my nine year old daughter to be the one who saved my life.

I want to tell you how I got to that chair, because none of it makes sense unless you understand what my husband and I built before he decided to burn it down with me still standing inside it.

My name is Genevra Ellinger. I grew up two miles outside Bellwood Creek, Missouri, a town so small the water tower has more personality than the welcome sign. I met Garnett Ellinger at a 4H auction when I was nineteen, and within a year we were married in the same little Methodist church my grandmother had been married in. We didn’t have money. We had a used truck, a rented apartment above the hardware store on Main Street, and a stubborn idea that we could build something of our own instead of working for somebody else’s name our whole lives.

That idea became Ellinger Feed and Farm Supply. We started it at our kitchen table with a card table calculator and a coffee can of seed money, and for the first three years I did the books by hand at night after our daughter Hettie went to sleep, because we couldn’t afford a bookkeeper and we sure couldn’t afford to lose track of a dollar. Garnett ran the counter and the deliveries. I ran the numbers, the payroll, the vendor accounts, all of it. By the time Hettie turned seven, we had two full time employees, a loyal list of farm families who wouldn’t buy their seed and tack anywhere else, and a little brick building on Route 9 with our name painted over the door in gold letters I had picked out myself.