What The Movers Found In The Mattress

In the end we hired it out. There is a young fellow in town, Cody Ahrens, who runs a little moving and hauling outfit out of his dad’s old grain truck, and he came out that Saturday with another boy named Darrell to take the mattress and the box spring and the iron frame to the transfer station in Carroll. I could have asked Dale to help me carry it down. But Dale’s back is bad and Joann had driven in from Omaha and would have to turn right around, and the truth underneath all of that is that I did not want my brother and sister and me carrying our mother’s deathbed down those stairs with our own hands. It felt like something you should pay strangers to do. Grief has its own strange economy. You will spend money to buy yourself one less thing to feel.

I remember standing in the empty bedroom that morning while the two boys sized up the stairs. The room without furniture in it looked so small. I had grown up thinking of that room as the center of the whole world, the place you went when you were sick or scared or the storms came up green in the west, and there it was, just a box with a window, the wallpaper gone pale in a rectangle where the headboard had stood. I had the thought, standing there, that this was it. That after the mattress went down the stairs there would be nothing left of them in that house but the smell, and the smell goes too, in the end.

Cody took the foot and Darrell took the head and they got it up on its edge, and that was when Darrell said, “This one’s heavy on this end.”

I was not really listening. I was looking at the pale rectangle on the wall.

“Feels like a whole second mattress in here,” he said, and he gave it a little heft to show Cody, and something inside it shifted. I heard it. It was not the sound a mattress makes. It was a dense, settling, sliding sound, the sound of a lot of small heavy things moving at once, and even now I cannot fully describe how it put the hair up on my arms. A mattress is supposed to be the same all the way through. This one was not.

“Hold on,” I said.

They stopped. Cody looked at me. I came around the end of the bed and put my hand flat on the mattress where Darrell had been holding it, down near where my mother’s feet would have been for thirty-one years, and I pressed, and under the batting and the quilted top there was something hard. A lot of somethings. Edges. I pressed along it and felt a seam that did not belong, a long ridge of stitching running parallel to the factory seam, close and even and done by hand. I knew my mother’s hand. I had watched it a thousand times at the Singer by the south window. This was her stitching. She had opened her mattress up and sewn it shut again, and she had done it so carefully that she had slept on top of whatever she put in there for however many years and never once let it show.