The Promise My Wife Made Me Keep

Ursula and I had built an ordinary, good life together in the forty four years before that hospital room. I ran the parts counter at the John Deere dealership outside Sedalia for thirty one years, retired now, and she taught fourth grade at the elementary school until her knees gave out on her. We raised one son, Duane, who lives in Springfield now with a family of his own and calls most Sundays. We sat in the same pew at First Baptist every week I can remember, third row from the back on the left, and Ursula ran the quilting circle for longer than anybody could recall who’d started it. She was, by every measure anyone in Sedalia would have offered you, a steady, unremarkable, deeply loved woman. Nobody who knew her would have guessed she was carrying something that heavy for that long.

I want to tell you I kept that promise because I am a man of my word. That’s true, but it isn’t the whole truth. I kept it because for eight months after the funeral, grief took up so much room in me there wasn’t space left over for curiosity. I closed her bank accounts. I gave her church dresses to the ladies’ auxiliary at First Baptist. I boxed up forty four years of a marriage into labeled totes in the garage, everything except one thin green folder in the bottom drawer of her sewing desk, marked in her careful hand: BLACKWATER BEND.

Twice a year, in April and in October, a property tax notice came from Cooper County. Six hundred and twelve dollars and change. I paid it without opening the folder further, the way you keep paying for a storage unit you know you should empty out but can’t quite make yourself deal with. Sedalia is not a large town, and word travels, and more than one person asked me over the years why Ursula Ordway held onto sixty acres of river bottom ground clear out past Pilot Grove that nobody in the family had ever farmed or fished or so much as mowed. I always gave the same answer she gave me. A bad investment. Let it be.