“Dale,” Bonnie said, holding the photocopy in her trembling hand, “that is the box you told me was for your fishing magazines.” The church fellowship hall went so quiet I could hear the refrigerator humming in the kitchen. A Jell O salad sat sweating on the table beside the plaque. Dale stood at the front of the room in his John Deere cap with his mouth open and no words in it. Nobody moved. The wife of the preacher stopped with a casserole spoon in the air.
Then Dale did what I have seen him do since 1982. He laughed. “Glen, buddy,” he said, “what is this? Some kind of joke? Those checks are a clerical mistake. The company sent them to the wrong address.” “To a box rented by you,” I said. “Endorsed with my name, in handwriting that is not mine, and deposited into an account at the Marion bank that has your wife on it.” I took out my green notebook and opened it to the page I had marked. “Six years, Dale. Two hundred eighty two thousand dollars. I have every date.”
Bonnie sat down hard on a folding chair. She was a quiet, careful woman, and she looked at the photocopy again, and then at the long row of figures in my handwriting, and she said, “Our boat.” Just that. “Our boat, and the camper, and the trip to Branson for our fortieth.” She raised her eyes to her husband. “You told me the insurance business was booming. You told me you had a good year.” The face of Dale crumpled, one piece at a time. “Bonnie,” he said, “I was going to tell you.”
A farmer with forty years of green notebooks set six years of missing checks on a church table and let the numbers talk.
The county attorney came in from the parking lot then. I had asked him to wait in his truck until I gave a sign. He is a gray haired man named Hollis Reed who went to high school with my Peg, and he walked across that hall with his hat in his hand, the way a man walks at a funeral. He nodded to the preacher. He nodded to me. “Dale,” he said, “I would like you to come downtown and answer some questions. There will be no handcuffs tonight. But you will need a lawyer.”
I thought Dale would run, or shout, or deny it until his last breath. Instead he took off his cap, which I had never once seen him do inside a church, and he turned it in his hands. “Glen,” he said, “when Peg got sick I was going to tell you about the lease. I really was. And then I had the checks in my hand, and the roof leaked, and my boy needed braces. I told myself I would pay it back out of next year. And then the next year came.” His voice cracked. “A man can fool himself for a long time.”
I said I knew that was true. I told him that for six years I had been fooling myself too, that I had sat at his table every Sunday and eaten the pot roast of his wife and believed him because he was family. “Peg would have seen it,” I said. “She always said you smiled a half second too long.” Somebody in the back of the hall let out a shaky laugh. “But she would also have wanted me to say one thing. You were the one who drove to Iowa City every Tuesday, when I could not. I will remember that too.”
The county attorney explained the terms in the parking lot afterward, under the sodium light. Dale would sign a confession and repay every dollar with interest, selling his house and the camper if it came to that. There would be a hearing. A judge would decide the rest. Bonnie stood a little apart from her husband, with her purse held tight against her chest. She came to me before they left. “Glen, I did not know,” she said. “I swear on my mother.” “I know you did not,” I said. “Peg always said you were the honest one in that family.”
It took eleven months. Dale lost the house. He sold his insurance agency to a younger man and took a job at the feed store in Marion, where, I am told, he is well liked. Bonnie moved in with her sister in Cedar Falls. The money came back in installments, in cashier checks sent to my post office box, the real one in Cedar Rapids. Each time I wrote the amount in my green notebook, and each time I felt a little lighter, as though I were writing off six years of a debt that was not really money.
With the money from the turbine sale, I did what Peg and I had always talked about and never done. I set up a scholarship at Kirkwood Community College, in her name, for farm kids who wanted to study agronomy. I bought a new combine for the neighbor boy who farms the quarter section next to mine, and let him pay it off whenever he could. And I kept the home place. The 400 acres of corn are still mine, and the turbines still turn above them on windy days, whispering like a good machine should.
Last spring I gave a talk at the community college. A young woman in the front row asked me why I had kept all those notebooks for forty years. I thought about it for a while. “Because numbers do not lie,” I said, “and people sometimes do. But the numbers do not forgive either. That part is for us.” She wrote it down. Then I opened a fresh green notebook, on a clean first page, and wrote the date and the rainfall, and under it, in smaller letters, a line I had never written before. Today, no debts.