I picked up the old wooden rice scoop and turned it over so that the initials burned into the handle caught the light. L. T. for Lester Tillman, my granddaddy, who had carved them with a hot nail in 1928. Beneath it lay the envelope with the green logo of Delta Agricultural Holdings, and across the top, in bold black letters, was the stamp Final Payment. I slid it across the table to my daughter. “Open it, Tina,” I said. Kyle, sitting beside her with his jaw tight and a drumstick forgotten in his hand, said sharply, “Leroy, what is this? Some kind of trick?” “It is a check,” I said. “And a receipt.”
Tina opened the envelope with trembling fingers. She drew out a wire confirmation and read it silently. Then she read it aloud, slowly, in a voice that grew smaller with every word. “Delta Agricultural Holdings. Final payment on the acquisition of Tillman Farms, one thousand one hundred acres, Craighead County. Twelve million, four hundred thousand dollars. Received in full on the nineteenth of September.” She lifted her eyes to mine. “Daddy, you were never in foreclosure.” “Never,” I said. “Not for a day. My farm has been free and clear since the time of my daddy, and the only man in Jonesboro who ever said different is sitting at this table eating the catfish of my wife.”
Ann put her hand on mine, and I felt it tremble. Kyle laid down the drumstick. His face, which had been red with embarrassment, turned the color of old putty. “Leroy,” he said, “I can explain. The fund was supposed to be a bridge. I was going to give it to you the minute the bank called.” “The bank never called,” I said. “I asked my banker, Mr. Treadwell, to check every account you opened. There are four. Tillman Farm Relief, and three more, all at different banks. Fifty one thousand dollars, Kyle. Not thirty eight. The page was only part of it.” Tina made a sound I will never forget, a low moan, the sound of someone discovering a wall in the dark.
An old rice scoop and an envelope stamped Final Payment on a supper table showed a farmer son in law what the family land was really worth.
She put the wire confirmation down and laid both hands flat on the tablecloth. Tina is thirty nine years old, and for eleven years she has been the kind of wife who tells strangers how clever her husband is. Now she turned to him slowly, as if her neck had grown stiff. “The bass boat,” she said. “You told me it was a trade show prize. You told me I was being jealous when I asked.” “Tina, babe,” Kyle began. “Do not babe me,” she said. “Four hundred people gave you money in the name of my father. My Sunday school teacher. The woman who cuts his hair. The man who delivers the mail.” She was crying now, but her voice was steady. “They thought they were saving a farm.”
Kyle opened his mouth, and for a moment I thought he would deny it all. Then something went out of him, as air goes out of a tire. He sat back in his chair. “I got in too deep,” he said. “The equipment business was going under. I owed everybody. I figured nobody was getting hurt. People like to give.” He looked at me with an odd, hunted expression. “I was going to tell you, Leroy. After the sale. I figured you would never miss it.”
I nodded slowly. “That is the saddest sentence I have ever heard a grown man say,” I said. “Because it means you thought of me as a bank.”
I laid out my terms without raising my voice. Every dollar in all four accounts would go back to the donors, with a letter of apology that Kyle would sign. The bass boat would be sold, and the money added to the fund. Kyle would go to work at the farmers co op in town, where my friend Earl needed a salesman, and his wages would be garnished until the last dollar was returned. And he would stand up at the VFW pancake breakfast, in front of the whole town, and tell them what he had done. If he refused any of it, I would hand everything to the district attorney that Monday.
Kyle stood up at the pancake breakfast. It was a cold November morning, and the hall was packed, four hundred people with their coats on, the smell of bacon and wet wool. He walked to the microphone as if he were walking to a gallows. For a long minute he stood there with his hands shaking, and then he said it, plain and low, the whole of it, and he did not look away. When he finished, nobody moved. Then old Bud Hollis, a farmer who had given him two hundred dollars, got slowly to his feet, put on his cap, and walked out the door. The room let him go. The rest did not.
Not a single donor pressed charges. Several refused the refund, and Kyle had to push the checks into their hands. Old Mrs. Garrett cried, and hugged him, and told him that the Lord gave second chances and so did Arkansas. He took the job at the co op. He sold seed and fertilizer on Saturdays in a feed cap, and I watched him, week by week, grow quiet and humble. Tina stayed. She told me that she had to learn who her husband was before she decided what to do about him. By spring they were in counseling, and by summer they were laughing again, in small, careful ways, like people walking on new ice.
The next November I held a catfish supper at the VFW hall for every one of the four hundred donors. I paid for the fish, the hush puppies, and the pie. Ann made her famous coleslaw. Kyle stood at the fryer all night, in an apron, and he did not speak a word unless someone spoke to him first. At the end, when the last plate had been cleared, I stood up with the rice scoop of my granddaddy in my hand and said that I wanted to thank them. The jar by the door now said, in the handwriting of Tina, For the New Roof of the VFW. They filled it before the pie was gone.
