The Note the Bank Called After the Drought

Brent Mabry did not look up when he slid the letter across his desk.

He looked at his screen. He was typing something, and he finished the sentence before he gave me the courtesy of his eyes.

“Mr. Becker, this is a notice of non-renewal on your son’s operating note,” he said. “The balance is $214,600. It comes due thirty days from today.”

I read the paper. It was one page, on the bank’s good letterhead, and it was dated November 3.

“Thirty days,” I said.

“The credit committee has concerns about the risk rating after this season.”

“This season is the reason we need the note renewed.”

“I understand that.” He said it the way you say it to a dog that has not learned the word yet. “It’s a business decision. Nothing personal.”

I want you to understand what that office was. Two years earlier it had belonged to Don Mercer, who ran the Bank of Harlan Bend for thirty-eight years out of a desk with a coffee ring on it. Don knew which of us had a sick wife and which of us had a boy in the service. Don renewed a note with a handshake and a question about your hay.

Then the Mercer family sold to Prairie Trust, a company with a headquarters seventy miles off and a logo like a wheat stalk drawn by a committee. They kept the building. A few months later they sent us Brent Mabry, forty-five years old, from Kansas City, with a fleece vest and a laminated card listing our risk categories.

I put the letter in my shirt pocket and stood up. My knees told me about the stairs I had climbed to get there.

“Is there anything that would change the committee’s mind?” I asked.

“Cash,” he said. “Or a reduction in exposure. Honestly, a sale of some collateral would resolve it cleanly.”

“The collateral is our bottom ground.”

“I’m aware.”

That was all. He held the door for me, and he was smiling when he did it.

I wanted to do something I would have had to confess in church. I did not. I walked down the steps, past the teller who would not meet my eyes, and sat in my truck for five minutes with my hands on the wheel.

Then I drove home to tell my wife.