The Secret Zadie Carried Past the Gate

We gave away nine of the twelve bicycles that way over about two years, one or two at a time, spaced out so nobody in camp would ever have reason to count and wonder. The other three, Bexley judged too far gone to save, and those did go out with the scrap hauler same as the company intended, which always struck me as fitting. We only saved what could still carry a child somewhere.

The war years came and went, the mine kept shrinking the way every coal camp in this part of Missouri eventually did, and by the time I was in my forties there wasn’t much left of Excelsior to guard at all. Vernal moved on to work security at the feed mill in town, and then I lost track of him the way you lose track of most everybody once the camp itself stops being a place people gather.

I kept riding my own bicycle well into my seventies, long after there was any sand left to carry, mostly out of habit and because Bexley, before he passed, used to say a woman my age had no business giving up the only exercise she still enjoyed. He died at seventy-eight, in his sleep, in the house we’d lived in the whole time, and at his funeral three grown men I barely recognized came up and shook my hand and told me they’d gotten their first bicycle from somewhere they never could explain, and had always had a feeling it traced back to him.

I didn’t tell them then. It didn’t feel like the moment, standing over a casket, to turn a grief into a story about myself.

It was another dozen years before I told anybody the whole truth, and the man I told was Vernal.

I ran into him on the sidewalk outside the hardware store in Novinger on an ordinary Tuesday, both of us old now, him leaning on a cane he plainly hated needing, me pushing my bicycle beside me because my knees had finally decided I couldn’t ride it anymore, only walk it like a companion instead. He stopped dead when he saw me and studied my face a long moment before he said my name, careful, like he wasn’t sure he believed it.