Vance Tolliver had a coffee can wired to his gatepost.
It was an old red Folgers can, the big kind, with a slot cut in the plastic lid. Somebody had punched two holes in the side and run baling wire through them and twisted it tight around the post. The wire was new. The can was not.
He tapped it twice with his knuckle before he lifted the chain.
“Twenty dollars,” he said. “Per family. Per day. Cash.”
It was a quarter to seven in the morning. Six inches of rain had fallen in two nights, and the whole world smelled like wet dirt and cut grass. Behind us, down the hill, I could hear the creek roaring where our low-water crossing used to be.
My son Easton sat beside me in the truck with his backpack on his knees. He was nine. He didn’t say anything. He just looked at the coffee can, and then at me.
“Vance,” I said. “You’re serious.”
“Dead serious, Jo.”
“The bus comes in eleven minutes.”
“Then you’d better pay quick.”
I’d known Vance Tolliver for twelve years. I’d bought hay from him. He’d pulled my truck out of a ditch one February with his tractor and wouldn’t take a dime. His wife used to bring us tomatoes before she passed. And now he was standing in the mud in his rubber boots with his arms crossed over his chest, waiting for me to pay a toll to get my kid to school.
I dug in my wallet. I had a twenty and two ones. I folded the twenty and pushed it through the slot in the lid. It made a little papery sound when it hit the bottom.
Vance lifted the chain and swung the gate open.
I drove through his hay meadow, slow, following the tire tracks across the wet field to the gravel county road on the other side. The yellow bus was just pulling up at the stop. Easton jumped out and ran.
He didn’t wave. He usually waves.
I pulled over to wait until the bus was gone. In my rearview mirror, I watched the next truck come up to Vance’s gate.
It was Ardith Pyle’s old green Buick with the cracked windshield. Her three kids were packed in the back like puppies in a box.
I watched Ardith get out. I watched her open her purse right there in the mud. I watched her count it out into her hand, slow, the way you count money when you know exactly how much you have and exactly how much you don’t.
A ten. A five. And five ones.
She pushed it through the slot one bill at a time.
Ardith cleans houses for $13 an hour. She has three kids and no husband and a Buick with 240,000 miles on it. Twenty dollars is an hour and a half of scrubbing somebody else’s toilets. Twenty dollars a day, five days a week, is a hundred dollars. That’s her electric bill. That’s a week of groceries.
Later that morning, she called me. She was crying a little and trying not to.
“Jo, you know what Tilly asked me in the car?”
Tilly is her littlest. Four years old. Still sleeps with a stuffed rabbit with one ear chewed off.
“What did she ask?”
“She said, ‘Mama, are we poor now? Because we have to pay to go to school?'”
I didn’t have anything to say to that. I just held the phone and looked out the window at the creek.
Ethan Blake is a skilled Creative Content Specialist with a talent for crafting engaging and thought-provoking narratives. With a strong background in storytelling and digital content creation, Ethan brings a unique perspective to his role at TheArchivists, where he curates and produces captivating content for a global audience.
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