The Secret Zadie Carried Past the Gate

A few weeks later they tried again. Then again after that. I lost count of how many times my sack went down to that assay office over three years. The answer was always the same, and after a while even the shift supervisor stopped bothering to write it up. Orval took to waving me through himself eventually, sifter and all, more out of familiarity than any real conviction I was clean. I believe by the end he’d simply decided that whatever I was doing, it wasn’t worth the sifting anymore, and he had ore samples enough to keep him busy without an old woman’s porch sand.

There was one close call, in my second year of it, that still turns my stomach a little to remember. The shift supervisor, a heavyset man named Kessler who took the tool thefts personally on account of one of the missing wrenches had been his own, decided to search our property directly instead of just my sack. He came out to the house on a Sunday afternoon with two other men, polite enough about it, hat in his hands, but plain about his purpose. Bexley had three of the rescued bicycles in the shed that very week, mid-repaint, the old Excelsior green half stripped off two of them and drying rags hung over the workbench.

I have never in my life thought as fast as I thought standing in that doorway. I told Kessler the shed was full of a church rummage sale collection I was helping gather for the Coble family’s own charity drive, bicycles included, and would he like to see the ladies’ quilting circle list of donors, because I kept it right there in my apron pocket, which was a bald-faced lie I invented in the space of one breath. He didn’t ask to see the shed at all. Something about a woman offering her paperwork so readily seemed to satisfy him more than the offer itself, and he tipped his hat and left, and I sat down hard on my own kitchen step once his car was out of sight and didn’t get up for a good ten minutes.