And I climbed out that access hole for my phone, because when I got the tape and the plastic peeled back down in the dust of that bin, it was not the thing a man dreads finding on a place a fella vanished off of. It was money, and it was paper.
Cash, banded up in a coffee can, and folded in with it a school notebook gone soft from the damp. I opened the notebook and it was a list, page after page, in Doyle careful pencil. Names. Just about every name in the county, near as I could tell, and mine right there among them. Beside each one, a number. What he owed. Feed store, four hundred and change. The vet, six hundred. Purdy for welding, ninety dollars. Me, three hundred and fifty for hay he never squared up. And at the bottom of the last page, underlined twice: Pay every one of them back, and tell them I was sorry, and that I was not the man they all think I turned out to be.
I sat down on an overturned bucket and I felt low, because I had been one of the loudest ones. When Doyle went under and lit out three years back owing the whole county, I called him a thief at the co-op same as everybody. We all figured he was down in Texas laughing at us with our money. And here was the truth, buried under two foot of rotten wheat: he had scraped together every dollar he could lay hands on, right down to what looks like the last of it, and hid it where the bank could not seize it, meaning for somebody to find it and set him right with his neighbors. Something in that man broke before he could do it himself. But he tried. He tried harder in his leaving than most of us manage in our staying.
There was not quite enough in the can to cover the whole list, but there was most of it. So I did what I believe Doyle wanted done. I carried that notebook around the county myself and paid out every name from the can, and where it came up short I made up the difference out of my own pocket, because by then it had stopped being about the money.
You should have seen the faces. Not one soul was glad about the cash. Every one of them went quiet the same way I had, thinking on the things they had said these three years. Old Purdy, who cussed Doyle longer and louder than anybody, took his ninety dollars and set it right back down on my truck seat and told me to put it toward finding the man.
We are looking now. Nobody knows where Doyle got to, or if he is even still living. But the story that goes around Enid about him has changed, and that is worth more than any hay money ever was. If you are out there, Doyle, you can come home. Your account in this county is settled, and it is settled in the black. We know now what kind of man you were, and we are sorry it took us this long to find it out.