Then, three days later, he put on his town clothes, told me to drive him back down there, and walked through those glass doors straight toward that same counter, and asked for the branch manager by name.
Month-end again. Lobby full again. I think he picked the hour on purpose and I never asked.
He did not raise his voice and did not bring up one word of Tuesday. He set a folder on the counter and said he had come to sign, not to argue.
Farm Credit out of Fort Morgan had approved the hay line Thursday morning in forty minutes, a quarter point better, on a phone call and two pages.
The rest of that folder was signature cards. The ranch operating account, open since 1961. The equipment account. And the Sterling Grazing Association, thirty-nine outfits across two counties, which my father has been treasurer of since 1981 and which had every dollar of its reserve in that branch.
He signed it all standing up, thanked the girl at the counter by name, and asked the manager to step outside a minute.
I went out with them because I was not going to miss it, and then wished I hadn’t.
Dad keeps a folder behind the seat of that truck. Out of it he took a photocopy, soft at the folds, of one page of the loan committee minutes of the First Plains Bank, dated the eleventh of June, 1974.
He was twenty-five that year. He had four hundred acres he did not own yet, a wife, and no security worth the paper.
Harlan Pruitt was president then and he wrote his own minutes.
Approved. No security offered and none required. This board has known the applicant’s people since 1919. We are in the business of lending to persons, not to collateral, and if this bank ever gets to where it lends only against dirt, I hope somebody buys us and puts us out of our misery.
Dad handed him the copy and said, that bank got bought. Then he got in the truck and we went home.
That is the whole thing. He never called anybody’s regional office and never let me put it on the internet, and I wanted to, and we had words about it in October.
The kid came out to the place the second week of November. Nobody invited him. He sat at that table two hours asking questions, and my father answered every one, and the two of them walked the calving pens afterward in his town shoes.
He is not at that branch anymore. He runs one down in Yuma and calls the house about four times a year, and last spring he wrote a hay line for a thirty-one-year-old woman with no security worth the paper, and he called Dad about it first.
The 1974 page is framed in our kitchen. Dad gave the copy away and kept the frame, which he says is backward and is not going to change.
A young man leaned on a counter and said fifty years of a man’s word was dirt and sentiment. The bank he worked for had that exact argument settled in writing in 1974, and it was in a file cabinet forty feet behind him the whole time.