The Secret Zadie Carried Past the Gate

So I gave the gate guard something honest to find.

Twice a week that spring and summer, I rode my own bicycle up to the gate at opening with a sack of sand tied across my handlebar basket, and I told the guard, truthfully, that I used it on our back steps, which iced something fierce in a Missouri winter and stayed slick with mud most of the rest of the year besides. He opened that sack every single time. Poured it out, felt through it, tied it back up, and waved me on same as he waved on any other camp wife headed to the company store.

What he never once did, not in three years, was look hard at the bicycle underneath me.

That was Bexley’s real trick, more than mine. He’d worked those old bicycles so long he could make small adjustments nobody but him would ever notice, a different curve to the handlebar, a saddle set an inch higher, so that on the mornings I rode out one of the rescued Excelsior bicycles instead of my own, dressed down in old green paint we hadn’t yet stripped, it still looked, to a tired man doing gate duty at six in the morning, like the same tired old bicycle that woman always rode. The sand was what he was hired to watch for. My bicycle was just the thing I happened to be sitting on while he watched it.

The young man on that gate most of those three years was named Vernal. He couldn’t have been more than nineteen when he started, a serious, decent boy from down toward Kirksville who took the job seriously because his family needed the wage and he wasn’t about to lose it to carelessness. He always spoke kind to me, always called me ma’am even after I told him plainly he could call me Zadie, and he never once made me feel like a suspect even while he was, in fact, suspecting me.