Money

He went to Arthur Mosher first, on the Wednesday, and it was the only thing he did that week that cost him anything he was not prepared to pay.

Arthur Mosher owed Wade Kelleher fourteen hundred and sixty dollars. That is a large sum for eleven weeks of a bad winter and it was earned honestly and both of them knew it to the dollar. The Mosher farm bought its pulpwood on a running account and settled in the spring; it had settled in the spring for thirty-one years; and there was not a scrap of paper on it, because in that county there was not a scrap of paper on anything between neighbors.

Arthur Mosher heard him out in the barn with a bucket in his hand.

"I can't," he said. "I haven't got it. The co-op's late on the milk and late on the calf cheque and I'm into the operating myself at the bank, and I'll tell you what I'll do, I'll write you a note for March and I'll get it to you by the tenth of April if I have to borrow it off my son."

"The tenth of April's no good."

"I know it's no good." Arthur Mosher set the bucket down. "What's it for?"

"It's for the balloon."

"That's what I thought." He looked at Wade Kelleher for a moment with the look that everybody in that county gave him, which had in it fourteen hundred and sixty dollars of guilt and a great deal of something else. "Your wife's cousin's girl," he said, not as a question.

"She's going Wednesday."

"I heard," Arthur Mosher said, and picked the bucket up, and that was the whole of it, and it is one of the two or three conversations in this account that I am certain of, because Arthur Mosher told it to me himself, with his wife listening, in the same kitchen where Olive had told me the other half, and he told it in the flat voice of a man who has been going over it for twenty-five years.

The bank in Potsdam was the second thing, and it was the more interesting of the two.

I have the name of the loan officer and I am not going to use it, because he did nothing wrong and because he is a decent man in his seventies and lives in a house with a porch. He had the two loans on his screen and he had the valuation, which was a valuation done by an appraiser in the summer when there was still a mill at Ashcroft Mills, and he had in front of him a man of twenty-seven in a coat thirteen years old with one arm that he did not use, and he did what a man does. He explained the position. The position was that the farm was security for the first loan and the second loan and that the second loan had a balloon, and that the balloon could be extended for one year at a fee of two hundred and fifty dollars and a rise in the rate, and that the extension needed a signed application, a financial statement, and the approval of the loan committee, which met on the second Tuesday.

The second Tuesday of April is the eighth, and the balloon was due the eleventh, and the extension would have put the payment off to the following spring at a cost, over the year, of about nineteen hundred dollars in interest and fee, on a farm that had nothing to pay it with.

"How much is it going to cost me over the year," Wade Kelleher asked him.

"I just told you."

"I know what you told me. I'm asking what it costs to buy one more year, and then one more, until there's nothing left to buy it with."

The loan officer looked at him for a while. Then he said, "It costs you twenty-three thousand dollars over eleven years, at the end, if you do it every year. Which is most of the place." And then, because he was a decent man, he said: "Wade, go and talk to a lawyer. Not to me. Go and talk to somebody in Malone and find out what it is you're actually signing. I'll hold the application until the eighth, and I'm telling you as a courtesy that if you come in on the eighth with it signed I will take it to committee, and if you don't, I won't, and either way nobody's going to be hard on you, and either way you're going to lose this farm."

That was the fifteen minutes in the bank, near enough, and Wade Kelleher drove home from it with the truck's heater on his knees, and it was snowing again, a fine dry snow that came at the windshield like sand.

He went to Malone on the Friday about the woodlot, and that is the third and last of the money attempts.

The outfit that had offered nineteen thousand dollars for the eleven acres the year before was a logging contractor out of Malone whose owner was in Florida from January to March. Wade Kelleher sat in the office of a woman who did the paperwork and explained what he was offering, and she was polite and she called Florida and she came back and said that the offer was now fifteen thousand, because the market for softwood pulp had gone down, and because the access was bad, and because they would need a right-of-way across the lower fields and a release signed by both owners of record.

Both owners of record.

That is the sentence that ended the twenty-fifth of March and the eleventh of April and everything after them, and I do not think it is possible to explain to anybody who has not lived in a place like that what it means to a man to be told, in an office in Malone, by a polite woman on a telephone, that the land his grandfather cleared is not his to sell, because six years into a marriage he had signed his wife's name onto the deed, not out of fear and not out of slyness, but because she had asked him to and because it had seemed a reasonable thing for a farming couple to do. The bank had no paper on that woodlot. What the woman on the telephone meant was that Verna Kelleher's name was on it too, and that a woodlot with two names on it cannot be sold by one of them.

He drove home and did not go into the house.

He sat in the truck in the yard in the dark with the engine off and the cold coming in through the vents, and he ran the last number, the one he had been avoiding for a week the way a man avoids a bill, which is by looking at it and not writing it down. A man of twenty-seven with a high-school certificate and a year and a half of a two-year farm-mechanics course and a left arm that will not take a load can get work in a machine shop in Syracuse or Utica at eleven dollars an hour, or he can get on a pipeline crew in Pennsylvania for eighteen and be gone eight months and be finished with it at thirty, or he can stay in the Hollow and plow for the town and cut wood until he is sixty and then be exactly what he is now, which is a man on a farm that is not his. And none of those three numbers adds anything at all to the number that was in front of him, which was that a girl with two bags and a duffel and forty-one dollars was going down to the Junction on the seven-ten on Wednesday morning, and that the only money on that place that was not already promised to somebody was three thousand four hundred dollars.

It was, in a manner of speaking, Verna's mother's money.

It had been in a savings account in Malone in Verna Kelleher's own name since the year her mother died, and it had been used once, six years before, for the new roof on the barn, and paid back, dollar for dollar, over two years, and Verna had told him at the time that she would never touch it again because it was the only money on that place that was hers.

He sat in the cold truck and looked at the house, where the kitchen light was on and one upstairs light was on, and he thought about walking in and saying it out loud, and he did not do it that night, and I want to record that, because the man who did not say it in the truck on the Friday night is the same man who said it, badly, on the Sunday, and there is a difference between those two men and the difference is the whole of what this county has been arguing about for twenty-five years.