“Boys, I raised this girl from nine years old,” Earl said, loud enough for the whole store to hear. “Fed her, clothed her, paid for her braces. Way I figure it, she owes me that tab and then some.”
He said it to the three men leaning on my counter. Not to me.
He said it with a big grin, like it was the best joke he’d told all year, and then he waited for them to laugh.
Nobody laughed.
Earl stood across the counter from me in his tan canvas chore coat and that faded green feed cap he’s worn since the first Bush was president. He had a week of white stubble on his jaw. He was still grinning.
Virgil Snell looked down at his hands. Don Akers suddenly got very interested in the price sign on the mineral tubs, like he’d never seen it before in his life. Ray Whitlow shifted his weight, and the old floorboards creaked under his boots.
It was a Saturday morning in October, about twenty minutes to eight. The store smelled the way it always smells in the fall, like molasses and dust and the cold air that rushes in every time somebody opens the door.
My name is Jolene Pratt. I’m 45 years old. My husband, Mitch, and I own Pratt Feed and Seed on the square in a little southwest Missouri county seat you’d drive straight through without slowing down.
And my stepfather had just told the three biggest talkers in the county that I owed him money for raising me.
I could feel the heat climbing up my neck. That old heat, the same heat I used to feel at twelve years old when the teacher called on me and I didn’t know the answer.
I had maybe three seconds to decide who I was going to be.
But to understand what I did with those three seconds, you have to know about the drawer under my register. And you have to know how I got there.
Mitch and I bought the store from old Harold Hostetler in 2011. Harold was ready to quit, and nobody else in the county wanted a feed store with a leaky roof and a cash register older than both of us put together.
We paid $185,000 for the building, the inventory and the name, with a loan from Ozark Mountain Bank that took us twelve years to pay off. We kept the register. We fixed the roof. It took two summers and most of our savings.
And we kept Harold’s habit of running charge tickets for the farmers who’d always run them. That’s how feed stores work out here. A man buys what his cattle need when they need it, and he settles up when he can. Most of those men pay like clockwork.
Every account has its own paper ticket. We keep them in a long wooden drawer under the register, in alphabetical order. When a man charges something, I write it on his ticket in my own handwriting. When he pays, I write that too.
Most tickets get settled at the end of the month. Some get settled in the fall when the calves sell. A few, from the oldest men, get settled in cash out of a billfold so worn it looks like leather tissue paper.
Earl Gaskin’s ticket hadn’t been settled in three years.
Feed. Mineral. Range cubes. A roll of barbed wire. Fence posts. A spool of hot wire. Two cattle panels. Line after line, front and back, in my handwriting, packed in so tight it all fit on one sheet.
The total was $7,200.
I knew it to the dollar. I’d added it up four times that week, sitting at our kitchen table after supper with a calculator and a cup of decaf that went cold beside my elbow.
Earl is my stepfather. He married my mother, Nadine, when I was nine years old. That was three years after my daddy died of a heart attack at 34, out in the middle of a July hay field, with the baler still running.
I remember the sound of that baler. I remember Mama running across the field in her house shoes.
Earl is 70 now. He runs sixty cows on the place his own daddy left him, eight miles north of town. He bought feed and mineral at this store for years before it was ever mine.
For the first twelve years Mitch and I owned the store, Earl paid. Not always on the first of the month, but he paid.
Then three falls ago, the payments stopped.
The charges didn’t.I never said a word about it. Not one, in three whole years.
I told myself he was having a hard stretch. I told myself the calves would sell and he’d walk in with a check. I told myself a lot of things.
Some people would’ve handled it differently a long time before that Saturday morning. I know that.
Mitch and I have a collection agency in Springfield we use maybe twice a year, for the rare account that goes bad, when a man moves off to Arkansas without a word. One phone call, and Earl’s ticket would’ve been their problem instead of mine.
But Earl is my mother’s husband.
A collection letter would’ve come to their mailbox with both their names on the house. Mama would’ve opened it at the kitchen table, the way she opens everything, with a butter knife.
I wasn’t going to put my mother’s name on a collection letter. I wasn’t going to make her choose between her husband and her daughter over a pile of mineral tubs and fence posts.
And I couldn’t tell Mama myself without it sounding like I was asking her to pay his bill. She and Earl have been married thirty-six years. Their money is their business. I didn’t want it to become mine.
So for three years, I carried it. And that ticket sat in the drawer under the register getting longer, and I got quieter about it every single month.
Two nights before that Saturday, Mitch found me at the kitchen table with the calculator.
“Fourth time this week,” he said, pulling out the chair across from me.
“Seven thousand two hundred,” I said. “It doesn’t change no matter how many times I add it.”
Mitch is 47. He’s not a big talker. When he asks you a question, he waits for the whole answer, even if it takes you five minutes to get there.
“What do you want to do, Jo?”
“I don’t know.” I rubbed my eyes under my glasses. “I want him to quit charging. I don’t even care about the money anymore. I just want it to stop.”
He rubbed the back of his neck, the way he does when he’s figuring the cost of something.
“It’s your call,” he said. “It’s your family. If you want to let it go, we’ll eat it.”
“It’s seven thousand dollars, Mitch. That’s the new roof on the warehouse. That’s the down payment on a delivery truck.”
“I know what it is,” he said quietly. “We’ll eat it. We’ve eaten worse. Just don’t let it keep growing.”
That’s where things stood when Earl put his elbow on my counter that Saturday.
Mitch was gone on deliveries to a dairy two counties over, the way he is most Saturday mornings. It was just me and the men.I need to tell you about those three men, because what they did and didn’t do that morning matters to the rest of this.
Virgil Snell is 82. He farmed two hundred acres of fescue and soybeans until his knees quit on him. He still buys his own mineral and carries it out to his truck himself, one fifty-pound sack at a time, and he won’t let anybody help him. Mitch tried once. Virgil looked at him like he’d offered to cut his meat for him.
Don Akers is in his seventies and runs a cow-calf operation south of town with his son. He tells the same story about the blizzard of ’79 every January. Every January, we let him tell it, and every January we act surprised at the ending.
