"Thank you, son," Hiram said.
Mrs. Ladd took a ballpoint pen out of the cup by her register and held it out. Hiram took it. He bent over the counter with the pen in his big fist like a man holding a branding iron, and he wrote his name, slowly, one letter at a time, his tongue between his teeth, H-I-R-A-M, the way his wife had taught him in the winter of 1931 so he could sign the papers on the farm. It took a long time. Nobody in the line said anything. When he was done he straightened up and put the pen back in the cup.
Mrs. Ladd counted the money on the counter, all of it, including the coins the Rimrock man laid down beside it from his palm, stacking the quarters in tens and the dimes in tens and the pennies in fives. It came to thirty-eight dollars and twenty-five cents, exactly, as the boy had said. She wrote out a receipt and tore it off the pad and handed it, after a moment's consideration, not to Hiram but to Troy. Then she reached under the counter and took out a pamphlet, folded in thirds, and laid it on top of the agreement.
"There's an energy assistance program for the winter," she said. "It's federal. It's done through the Community Action office on Fourth Street. You'd have to fill out an application." She paused. "It's a long one. There's a lot of questions."
Hiram looked at the pamphlet. And then, to Neva's astonishment, he laughed. It came up out of him like water out of a well that had been capped a long time, rusty, and once started he couldn't stop it, and he stood at the center window of the Oklahoma Natural Gas office with one hand on his grandson's shoulder and laughed until he had to take out his handkerchief.
"Another paper," he said. "Lord God. Another paper."
"I'll read it to you, Grandpa," the boy said.
"We'll read it together," said Hiram Gilstrap, and picked up his hat.
They went out to the Galaxie, the two of them, and got in, and sat there in the front seat with the doors closed. Neva didn't follow. She stood on the sidewalk by her Pontiac with its two wheels up on the curb and watched them through the windshield. She couldn't hear anything. She saw the old man talking, and the boy putting both hands over his face, and the old man setting his hat on the dashboard next to the Bible and pulling the boy against his side with one long arm, and holding him there, looking straight ahead out the windshield at Main Street, for a long time.