Daddy had the green ledger clutched against his chest like a man holding a drowning child, and he did not let go when I took hold of the other end. “Put the badge back, Lonnie,” he said again. “I told you why. The sheriff now is the son of Dale Pruett, and I owe that family more than you will ever know.” I stood in the hay dust of the old barn in Dodge City, fifty six years old, with a handkerchief in one hand and the badge of Ford County in the other. He was shaking, and I understood then that my father was not afraid for the ledger. He was afraid for himself.
He told it sitting on a hay bale, with the green ledger on his knee. In the winter of 1992, he had lost our house in a game of poker in this very barn. The man who won it, Dale Pruett, sheriff of Ford County, had torn up the deed in front of the whole table and told Daddy to go home to his family. Sheriff Pruett had covered the loss out of his own pocket, forty thousand dollars. Daddy had sworn he would pay it back, and for thirty three years he had not. He had lost, borrowed, and lost again, and the debt had grown in the dark.
The last line of the ledger, the line I had read aloud, said that Sheriff Pruett lost his badge in the game in 1985, and owed my grandfather forty thousand dollars, and would pay him back the other way. “Do you know what the other way was?” asked Daddy, hoarsely. “For ten years the sheriff warned your grandfather every time a raid was coming. He kept the poker game alive. And in the end, he paid his own debts to the family by paying mine.” He looked at the badge in my hand. “Lonnie, that badge is not a trophy. It is the evidence of an honest man who made a dishonest bargain, to protect us.”
A green ledger pulled from a feed sack gave one grandson the afternoon to bring his father back to an honest table in Dodge City.
I gave my terms there in the barn, with the ledger on the hay bale and the badge in my fist. “Daddy, we are driving to the sheriff office this afternoon, the two of us, and handing this badge to Sheriff Mike Pruett with our own hands. We are going to tell him everything. He has a right to know what his father did and why. And then you are going to go to the Tuesday night meeting of Gamblers Anonymous at the Methodist church, which I have already looked up, and you are going to walk in the door. I will wait in the parking lot every week until you are done.”
Daddy put both his hands over his face. “I started this ledger the year I turned eleven,” he said, “counting the money my father won. I thought it was the greatest thing in the world. A table full of grown men, bowing to him. I never understood that the men were losing something, too. I lost the house. I lost your mother. I lost the sheriff, who was a friend. And every Friday I swore I would win it all back.” He lifted his head. His eyes were red. “I do not want to end my days in a barn, Lonnie.”
Then, with a strangled sound, Daddy jumped up from the hay bale, snatched the green ledger off his knee, and ran for the burn barrel in the yard, where a low fire was smoking. He was sixty seven years old with a bad hip, and he ran like a boy. He had nearly reached the barrel when Efrain, the old ranch hand of Grandpa who had slept in the barn loft for forty years, stepped out of the shadow of the doorway and stood in front of the fire with his arms crossed. He was a head taller than Daddy and twice as wide.
“Mr. Gene,” said Efrain, in his soft Spanish accent, “your father told me, long ago, if you try to burn this book, I should not allow it. He said it is the only honest thing he ever wrote.” Daddy halted, the ledger half raised over the flames. His arm trembled. Then he lowered it, slowly, and turned to face me. I walked over and took the ledger gently from his hand. The wind carried the smoke away across the wheat field. Efrain put a big hand on the shoulder of my father, and Daddy let it rest there.
The money consequences were measured. Sheriff Mike Pruett, a quiet and decent man, listened to the whole story in his office with the door closed. He took the badge of his father, turned it over in his fingers, and said that he had always wondered where it went. The old debt of forty thousand dollars, he said, had been forgiven in 1992, and he would not hear a word about it. The coffee cans with one hundred and twenty six thousand dollars were returned to the families of the men who had lost them, according to the ledger, as far as we could find them.
In the name of Earl, who passed this spring, I started the Earl Dunning Fund. It pays for debt counseling and legal aid for families harmed by gambling, in Ford, Gray and Meade counties. In the first year we helped sixty three households keep their homes. One was a rancher of seventy from Cimarron who had signed away his wheat crop to a man in Wichita. A lawyer from our list voided the contract in an afternoon, and the old man stood in his field and let the wind blow through his hat.
Daddy walked into the Methodist church basement on a Tuesday night in May, with a folding chair in his hand and his shoulders squared, and I sat in my truck in the parking lot, as promised. I watched the window of the basement glow yellow in the dusk. An hour later he came out with a paper cup of coffee and a small plastic chip in his fist. He got in the truck, held up the chip, and looked at me. “Twenty four hours,” he said. I turned the key.