The Feed Tally

The sign on the gate still read Dry Creek Ranch in paint that was peeling, and I had been reading that sign for thirty-three years. I was sixty-two now, and I had been the feed store officer for this county since I was twenty-nine. Josephine Cunningham had been my girlfriend for two of those years. The rest had been ledgers and bale counts and men telling me the rain was coming next week.

It was not coming next week. It had not come in nine months.

I pulled my county truck through the gate at ten past six. The sky was doing that thing it does out here, going pink at the edges while the middle stays dark a while longer. The porch on the clapboard house sagged the way it always had, and I had told Josephine twice that I would fix it, and she had told me twice to stay in my lane.

Her truck was already at the feed barn. That was my first sign something was off. Josephine did not get up before dawn unless there was a problem she wanted to be standing in front of when I found it.

I parked and walked in. She was at the tally table with the old ledger open, a pencil behind her ear and a mug of coffee she was not drinking. Fifty-eight years old, hands like glove leather, hair going gray in a way she refused to call gray.

"Morning," I said.

"Morning." She did not look up.

I had been doing counts in barns for most of my life, so I did it without hurrying. I walked the rows. I counted the stacked bales in the south bay, then the north bay, then the covered pile by the door. Then I did it again, because the second number matched the first number and neither one matched the ledger.

"Josephine, where's the rest of it?"

"What do you mean."

"You're short. By my count you're short two tons. The ledger says you bought four tons of alfalfa cubes in September and the tally says you've got two on hand. Where did two tons of cubes go?"

She set the pencil down on the table, very straight, the way she does when she is about to tell me something she has already decided not to apologize for.

"I sold it."

I stood there a minute. "You sold it."

"Roper got sick. The vet bill was eleven hundred dollars and I didn't have eleven hundred dollars, Manny. I had two tons of cubes and a man in Dalhart who pays cash."

"That's rule one. We wrote it together, in this barn, sitting on that bench. Feed counts must match bales on hand. That's the first rule because it's the one everything else hangs on."

"I know what rule one says. I wrote it, you wrote it, we both signed it." She finally picked up the coffee and drank some. "The state subsidy says my feed records have to be clean. It does not say my horse has to die on my porch because my records have to be clean."

"Nobody's saying the horse should die. I'm saying you should have called me."

"Called you and said what? That your girlfriend, who you inspect twice a year, needed a loan from the county man who inspects her? That's not a call I was willing to make."

I will say this for being sixty-two. It slows you down. At thirty I would have said something I would have spent two years paying for. I counted bales in my head one more time instead.

"I can cover it," I said. "There's a discretionary line in the drought reserve. I can move three tons of cube credit onto your account and it'll wash in the quarterly reconciliation."

She looked at me then, and I could not tell if what was on her face was relief or something worse.

"That's not your money," she said.

"It's nobody's money. It's a rounding bucket. It has been a rounding bucket since 1998."

"Manny."

"It's a loan," I said. "You'll pay it back when the herd sells. On paper it'll be a correction, not a gift, and I'll write it up as a transfer."

"Rule two says no backdated approvals!"

"Rule two says no backdated approvals and I'm not backdating anything. Yet."

She almost laughed at that. Almost. Then she went back to the ledger and I went to the truck to call the office, and that is where the morning went from bad to the kind of morning you know you will be explaining to somebody someday.

The phone rang four times. Marilyn Hazelwood picked up. She is fifty-five, my chief officer, promoted over me two years back, and she has never once let me forget that the promotion went the wrong direction in her opinion.

"Butterworth. It's six forty-five."

"Time zone doesn't change the math, Marilyn."

"What math."

I looked out at the corrals. The cattle stood in the gray light with their heads down, waiting on a feed delivery that was now two tons lighter than the paper said it was. Debbie's porch light was on in the bunkhouse. Josephine's kitchen light came on. I could see both of them from where I stood, and I said the thing anyway.

"The September delivery on the Cunningham account. The state forms want an inspection date on the receiving end. I was on site the week of the twelfth but the form didn't get signed that day. I'll paper it as inspected on the fourteenth."

There was a pause on the line long enough that I heard the office coffee pot cycle off.

"You want me to log a false date."

"I want you to log the date the inspection should have happened."

"Those are different sentences, Manny."

"They're the same date, Marilyn."

"They are not the same date, and you know they're not, and I know they're not, and the state auditor who is coming through here in three weeks does not care which one of us thinks it's the same date." Her voice had that flatness it gets when she is deciding something about a man's career. "Which account is this."

"Cunningham."

"Of course it's Cunningham." A pause. "Log it yourself. I'm not touching your date. And Manny, if the audit pulls that form, it's your signature on it, not mine."

"That was always going to be true."

"Yes," she said, and hung up.

I sat in the truck and wrote the date on the form. My hand did it fine. The pencil shook, or so I'd like to claim, but it didn't. My hand has been filling out these forms for thirty-three years and it does not shake for anything. Then I signed it, and sat there a second longer than a man should sit with a thing like that.

When I looked up, Debbie was standing by my window.

She is thirty-two, Josephine's daughter, and she has known me since she was twenty-two, ten years of watching me count her mother's bales. She had her arms crossed and her jaw set, and she is the one person in three counties who has never been one bit impressed by the clipboard.

"What was that phone call," she said.

"Work call."

"I heard my mother's name and I heard the word fourteenth and I heard you say paper it. So what was that phone call, Manny."

I rolled the window down the rest of the way. The cold came in and I let it.

"The September receiving inspection didn't get signed on time. I'm putting the date it should have gone in."

"You weren't here on the fourteenth."

"No."

"Then that's a lie on a state form."

"It's a correction on a state form."

"Mama didn't sign a thing, did she. This is all you." She uncrossed her arms and put one hand on the door. "You've got a pension, Manny. You've got thirty-three years in. You're bending your own rules for us and I didn't ask you to and she didn't ask you to."

"The rules were ours," I said. "Both of ours. Your mother and me."

"Then act like it."

The screen door of the main house banged behind her and Josephine came across the yard fast, still in her robe, coffee mug in hand. She got between Debbie and the truck the way she does, shoulder first, like a heifer moving a calf.

"Debbie, go check the water troughs."

"Mama."

"Water troughs. Now."

Debbie stood there one more second, then went. Josephine leaned on the door of the truck, close enough that I could smell the coffee on her breath, and she looked at me with something I did not like, because it was not gratitude and it was not anger. It was worry.

"You falsified a date," she said.

"I corrected a date."

"Don't split that hair with me, Manny Butterworth, I've read every rule you ever wrote and you wrote rule two in my kitchen." She looked down at the form on my clipboard, at my signature under the date. "That's your name. That's your pension. That's thirty-three years with your name on it."

"I know whose name it is."

"And you did it for me." She was quiet a second. "I didn't ask you to do that."

"I know you didn't."

"Then why does it feel like I did?"

I didn't have an answer for that, so I didn't say anything, and she stood there in her robe in the cold, and the light got a little stronger over the corrals, and somewhere down the road I could hear Garth Laurent's old truck coming, because Garth Laurent is sixty-seven and has never in his life missed the start of anything.

Garth's truck came up the county road slow, because Garth drives as one who owns the road and the ditches both. He pulled in behind my county truck, killed the engine, and got out with a thermos under one arm. He was wearing a jacket that predates most of the cattle in the pens.

"Manny Butterworth," he said. "Out here before seven. Either the county's paying you overtime or somebody's in trouble."

"Morning, Garth."

He came up to the door of the truck and looked in at the clipboard on my seat. He didn't say anything about it. He poured coffee into the thermos cup and handed it to me through the window, which is a thing he's done since I was thirty-five and he was forty, back when he was on the feed board and my boss's boss's boss in every way that mattered out here.

"You look peaked," he said. "You sleeping?"

"Sleeping fine."

"Good. Because I stopped at the feed store in Barnett yesterday to buy a sack of oats for the horses, and who do you think was standing at the counter talking to Royce?"

"Who."

"Fellow in a white shirt and a tie. Didn't buy a thing. Had a clipboard of his own. Royce said he asked questions about who'd been buying alfalfa cubes in quantity this fall, and who'd been paying cash." Garth sipped his own coffee. "I don't suppose that would interest a feed store officer."

My stomach did something it hadn't done since the year the subsidy rules got rewritten, which was a bad year. "White shirt and tie. Big fella?"

"Medium fella. Glasses. Car had a state seal on the door."

"That's the auditor."

"I figured." He looked out at the corrals, at Josephine's cattle standing around waiting on feed that wasn't there. "Manny, I've been watching you work this county for thirty-three years. You've got a good name. Royce at the feed store has got a good memory, though. And a good memory plus a receipt book is a bad combination for somebody."

"What are you saying?"

"I'm saying I saw what I saw and I said what I saw and now I'm going to drive home and feed my dogs." He screwed the lid back on the thermos. "You take care of yourself, you hear."

He got in his truck and left. I sat there holding coffee I didn't want.

The feed store opens at eight. I was in Barnett by seven forty, sitting in the county truck across from it like some kind of private detective, which at sixty-two years old is a ridiculous thing to be. Royce saw me through the window and waved. Royce has known me longer than Josephine has. That's the part that made it hard.

I went in and bought a sack of cattle mineral I didn't need, nineteen dollars, and I asked Royce how business was.

"Slow," he said. "Drought's got everybody buying by the sack instead of by the ton. You want a receipt?"

"I'm good."

"You sure? Book's right here."

And there it was. The duplicate book, carbon copies, three to a page, every sack of cubes and every ton lot sold since August. And on the September page, in Royce's square handwriting, a cash sale, two tons alfalfa cubes, buyer's name, Dalhart address, the fourteenth of September.

The auditor had seen it. Royce had shown him, because Royce is honest, which is a fine quality in a feed store man and a terrible quality for me.

Rule three, which I wrote in 1994 and have recited at every training session since: all records must be kept for three years. Every duplicate, every carbon, every tally sheet, three years, because a feed subsidy audit lives and dies on paper.

I bought my mineral. I talked to Royce about the weather for four minutes, which is how long it took me to decide the thing I decided. Then I said I needed to use his restroom, and his restroom is through the back office, and his duplicate book was open on the counter behind him while he waited on the Warner boy.

I know how this sounds. I knew how it sounded while I was doing it. I tore the carbon out clean, both copies, the customer copy and the store copy, and folded it into my jacket, and walked out through the back door into the alley, and I have never in thirty-three years gone out a back door at a feed store.

I shredded it in the office shredder at nine forty. Rule three, gone, by the man who wrote it, at his own desk, with his own machine. The shredder made that sound it makes, and I