She Paid $55 for a Sealed Farm Barrel — 24 Days Later, Everything Changed
Chapter 5
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They drove it through the middle of Harlan Creek at ten miles an hour. People came out of the diner, people came out of the hardware store. The old men on the bench in front of the bank pointed, and one of them shouted, "There goes Junie's National Granary!"The whole sidewalk laughed.Junie rode in the cab of the wrecker beside Wendell with her cap pulled low, looking straight ahead.By dark, the canister sat on a crib of stacked timbers beside the old shed, covered with a blue tarp and tied down at every corner. Junie walked around it twice with a flashlight, then sat at the kitchen table and copied the numbers from all six lead tags into her notebook. Every one was whole.The laughing did not stop when the canister left the road. On Monday morning at the coffee counter, Cal told everyone the Halverson girl would have it sawed open within the week. "A 12-year-old? She'll be out there by Friday with a flashlight, and all she'll find is a handful of straw and a mouse on a pension."On Wednesday at the gas station, he saw her buying a soda and called across the pumps, "Little curator! Has Washington written back yet?" Two men filling their trucks laughed out loud.By the end of the week, half the town had started calling the canister "The National Stockpile," and the other half called Junie "Madam Secretary." Grown men bowed to her outside the post office; they meant it as a joke, but it was not a kind one.Her mother saw how it was wearing on her. She came home quiet, went straight out back to check the ropes on the tarp, and then sat at the kitchen table writing in her notebook until bedtime."What are you writing, honey?""Letters."She had found the name in her grandfather's shed, on the shelf above the sorting table, in a stack of newsletters from the Heritage Seed Society that he had kept for nearly thirty years. On the back page of one issue was a list of the board, and beside one name, Tobias had made a pencil check:Dr. Maren Okonkwo, Director, Heritage Wheat Seed Bank, University of North Dakota.Junie wrote in pencil first, and then copied it over in ink, with her mother checking the spelling. She told her about the sale and the canister, and the wheat stalk seals and the paint on its side. She said nobody had opened it, and nobody would, until somebody who knew what they were looking at was standing there. She tucked in six photographs her mother had printed at the drugstore.