The Feed Bill a Stranger Paid

The co-op’s feed store in Elgin smells like molasses, dust, and cold concrete, and on the third Tuesday of October it smelled the same as it has since I was a boy holding my father’s pant leg.

I came in for two sacks of cow mineral, the way I do every other week once the pasture goes brown. Gary Pfeifer was not at the counter.

He was in the back, by the old office, down on one knee beside a gray metal filing cabinet with every drawer pulled open and a stack of cardboard banker’s boxes at his elbow.

“Don’t mind me, Vern,” he said without looking up. “Your mineral’s on the dock. Eighteen forty a sack now, I’m sorry to say.”

I am sixty-five years old. I have been buying feed in that building for forty-three years, and I have never once seen Gary Pfeifer on his knees.

He is seventy-one. He started on the feed truck in 1977, climbed into the counter job when his back quit, and he has a way of standing behind that register with both hands flat on the wood like he is holding the place down in a wind.

“What are you doing back here?” I asked.

“Boxing the old account cards.” He tapped the cabinet. “Regional office bought us out, you know that. They’re putting everything on the new computer system the first of November. This counter closes the thirty-first. After that it’s a pickup window, and a kid from Norfolk on Tuesdays and Thursdays.”

“Those cards are going to the shredder?”

“Truck comes Friday. Anything before 1995 isn’t in the computer and nobody up in Omaha wants to scan it. Seven years’ retention, they told me, and we’ve kept these a lot longer than that because Hap never threw out a piece of paper in his life.”

He pulled a drawer toward him and it screeched on its rails. Inside were rows and rows of cream-colored cards, each one with a tab, each tab typed or lettered by hand.

I looked at that drawer longer than I meant to. I do not know what made me say what I said next.

“Is my dad’s in there? Walt Halstead?”

Gary’s hand stopped. It was a small stop, the kind you would only notice if you had watched the man work for forty years, and I had.

“Well,” he said. “Yours would be under H, and your dad’s would be the same card. Hap just kept going on it after your dad passed. Why?”

“I’d like to see it.”

“It’s a lot of old numbers, Vern.”

“I know what’s on it. I’d like to see it anyhow.”

He looked at me for what felt like a while. Then he got one hand on the cabinet and pushed himself up, and his knee cracked like a green stick, and he carried a box to the counter and set it down between us.

I want to tell you why I wanted to see that card, and for that I have to go back a long way.

My father, Walt Halstead, died on the third of September in 1983. He was fifty-eight years old and he went down in the farrowing barn between two sows with a pitchfork still in his hand.