The Secret Zadie Carried Past the Gate

“Miz Mercer’s back with the sand,” he’d say to whoever was working the scale house with him, and somebody would always answer back that an old woman surely couldn’t be up to much, and Vernal, bless him, was too conscientious to let that satisfy him. He kept checking. Every single time.

After a few months of it, the shift supervisor decided the whole business had gone on long enough to look odd, and he had a sample of my sand sent down to the company assay office, the same place that tested ore samples, because somebody had floated the idea I might be carrying off fine coal dust or galena dressed up to look like sand, to sell on the side to another outfit. I sat on the bench outside the scale house while they did it, not complaining, because I had nothing in the world to be nervous about. The sand, every time, came back exactly what it looked like. Plain sand.

The assay man’s name was Orval Deeter, and he had a way of pouring sand through a flour sifter like he expected it to argue back. I watched him do it that first time, methodical, patient, tilting the sifter under the window light and running his thumb through what stayed behind. He found a pebble the size of a pea once and got so excited he nearly ran it straight to the super’s office before he cracked it open with a hammer and found nothing inside but more pebble.

“I’m sorry to have troubled you, Miz Mercer,” he told me afterward, red around the ears. “It’s only that a woman doesn’t usually take this kind of interest in a sack of sand.”

“A woman doesn’t usually have icy back steps either, Mr. Deeter,” I said, “but I do, and I intend to keep both my hips.”