They Sold Me to the Crippled War God, So Why Was He Standing in My Father's Barn on Two Good Legs novel · Chapter 18 of 24
Chapter 18: The Second Ledger
She did not want me to come to the farm.
I knew that when her second text arrived an hour later, while Seb and I sat in his truck with the windows fogged and my heart still going.
It said: Not the house. I'll bring them to the mill house at ten. Bring Seb if you must.
"She wants a witness," Seb said.
"She wants an audience," I said.
"Those are different."
"With her they're the same."
She arrived at ten the next morning in her small gray car, in her navy dress and her pearls, carrying a banker's box on her hip as if it were a casserole.
She set it on the kitchen table.
"Fifteen years," she said.
"All of it."
She did not sit.
She took off her gloves one finger at a time and laid them on the lid.
"I'd like a cup of coffee, if it's not poisoned."
Seb poured her one.
She drank it standing and looked around the kitchen.
Her eyes went to the framed letter from the National Guard.
"Raymond had one like it in the co-op office," she said.
"To keep Mr. Guidry fond of us.
"It hung there until the day the rumor started, and then he took it down and burned it in the stove."
"I put up another," said Seb.
"I know," she said.
"I looked for it in the dark, every time I drove by."
I sat down and pulled the box toward me.
Inside were six green cloth ledgers like the one my father had held on the stage, and a smaller black one wrapped in an elastic band.
"The green ones are what he showed the board," Bernadette said.
"The black one is what he did."
I opened it.
It was the same cramped hand and the same blue ink, and every entry was a date and a sum and a few words in the margin.
It began fifteen years ago.
It was not the record of a theft.
It was the record of a man slowly learning how.
A hundred dollars the year after his wedding, for the roof.
Four hundred, the year my mother's old friends stopped asking after the fund.
Then thousands.
Then the first large sum: ninety thousand, paid to a Biloxi lawyer and marked with a small blue B.
"That's her," I said.
"The woman in Biloxi."
"Yes," Bernadette said.
"I've known since the second year."
"You knew," I said.
The rest of this chapter is part of the paid portion of the series. Chapters 1–6 of They Sold Me to the Crippled War God, So Why Was He Standing in My Father's Barn on Two Good Legs are free to read — start from the beginning, then unlock the rest with coins in the app.
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