She Paid $55 for a Sealed Farm Barrel — 24 Days Later, Everything Changed
Chapter 6
Theme:
Font Size:
24px
And because her grandfather had once mentioned the Department of Agriculture's Plant Genetic Resources office, she wrote a second letter to them with the same six photographs.They mailed both on a Thursday. Then they waited.The second week was the hardest. Every afternoon Junie checked the mailbox, and every afternoon it held an electric bill, or a seed catalogue, or nothing at all.On Saturday, Cal Rudd came by the house. He did not get out of the truck. He pulled up on the gravel, rolled down the window, and looked over at the blue tarp with the tired smile of a man doing a favor for a child who didn't deserve it."My price just went up, kid. 200 cash, and I'll haul it off myself. That's four times your money, and your mama gets her yard back. Nobody else in this county is going to give you a better deal."Two of his men sat in the truck bed, grinning."No, thank you, Mr. Rudd.""You haven't even heard from Washington?" He laughed, shaking his head. "Kid, those PhDs don't read letters from children. Nobody's coming. You're going to sit out here waiting on a ship that's never going to dock. When you finally get tired of being the town joke, you call me. The price will be lower by then."He drove off. The men in the truck bed laughed all the way down the road.That night, the wind came up hard out of the west. Around midnight, Karen woke to a sound like a rifle shot, and then another, and she knew it was the tarp. She found Junie already pulling on her boots in the kitchen.They went out together in their rain jackets with two flashlights, and in the slanting rain, they caught the flapping corners and wrestled them down and tied them off again—mother and daughter soaked to the skin, laughing a little at the end because there was nothing else to do.When the tarp was tight, Karen shone her flashlight on her daughter. Junie was standing beside the canister with one hand on the iron. In her other hand were her grandfather's wire cutters."Mom, I wasn't going to..." she said, then honestly: "I thought about it. What if Mr. Rudd's right? What if there's nothing in there? What if I spent all my money on a joke, and everybody was right about me?"Karen gently took the cutters out of her hand. "Then you'll have learned what it costs to keep your word," she said. "That's not nothing, either. Your grandpa kept his word his whole life. It never once made him rich, but nobody ever laughed at him twice."