He set the cup beside his plate, looked around at every last one of them, one by one, and said: I’m glad you brought it up, because I’ve got work and I’ve got nothing else.
Then he took a folded paper out of his shirt pocket and passed it to the nephew with the hospital bills.
It was the amortization schedule off the land contract.
Ray did not sell that farm ground for a check. He sold it to the Bierbaum boy next door on contract, because Bierbaum could not get a bank loan and Ray was not going to let those eighty acres go to a hedge fund out of Chicago. Fifteen years, nine hundred and forty dollars a month, with the deed staying in Ray’s name until the last payment in 2039, when Ray will be ninety-one years old and, as he pointed out to that table, most likely dead.
Nine hundred and forty dollars a month. That’s the whole payout. It goes to his rent at the duplex and his insulin and the propane.
There is no pile of money. There never was one. They had built a man in their heads out of a rumor about eighty acres.
Then he said the second half, and this is the part that mattered.
The barn on that place is coming down or coming back, and Bierbaum wants it back, and Ray had agreed to run the job because he framed barns for thirty-one years before his knees quit. He needed four men. Twenty dollars an hour, cash, Saturdays through November, and he’d already talked to Bierbaum about the money.
He said it looking right at the nephew.
I can’t hand you six hundred dollars. I can hand you six hundred dollars’ worth of Saturdays, and at the end of it you’ll have the money and you won’t owe anybody at this table a thing, including me. That’s the best offer I’ve got and it’s the only one.
Nobody said anything for a minute. That circle came apart the way a circle does when there’s nothing left holding it together.
Two of them showed up. The nephew with the hospital bills and a cousin’s boy of about twenty who nobody expects much out of.
They worked every Saturday from the last week of September until the first snow. Ray taught that twenty-year-old to lay out a rafter with a framing square, which took three weekends and a good deal of language, and that kid is now working for a crew in Ozark full time and making more than his daddy ever did.
The nephew paid off the hospital in January. He told me so himself and he was not humble about it, and I do not blame him.
Nobody has cornered anybody at a picnic table since. Ray says that’s because the routine only works on a man who’s got nothing to offer but money, and he made sure they all know he hasn’t got any.
The barn’s standing. They painted it in June.