The Furnace Man Came on Monday

I could see my breath in my own kitchen the night I found it.

That was nothing new. I had been seeing my breath in that kitchen every January for nineteen winters. What was new was that the wood stove had been out for three days, because the man who fed it was lying in a hospital bed in Lincoln with his chest wired shut, and I had been sleeping in a vinyl chair beside him.

So the house was not cold the way it was usually cold. It was cold the way a machine shed is cold. Dale kept a thermometer nailed up by the back door, a giveaway from the co-op with a faded ear of corn on it, and it said thirty-four degrees.

Inside.

I turned on the kitchen tap to fill the kettle and nothing came out.

“Oh, no,” I said out loud, to nobody. “No, no, no.”

I got down on my knees on the linoleum and opened the cupboard under the sink and put my hand on the pipe. It was like taking hold of a gate latch in a blizzard. Frozen, but not split, as near as I could tell by feel.

The trouble light lived on the top shelf of the back porch, above the chest freezer. Dale had thawed that same pipe a dozen times with that light and an old bath towel, and every time I had stood behind him and held the towel.

I went out there in my coat and my good hospital shoes and reached up for it in the dark. The cord was wound around something. I pulled. I ought to have known better than to pull.

His tackle box came down off that shelf, hit the porch floor, and broke open like an egg.

It was his father’s tackle box, a green metal one with a dent in the lid, and it was the only thing Dale had carried off the home place before the sale in 1984. I got down on my knees for the second time that night to pick up bobbers and hooks.

Under the top tray, where it had fallen out, was a bread bag with a twist tie on it.

There was something flat inside.

I plugged in the trouble light and hung it on the nail by the door and untwisted the tie.

It was a savings book. Dark green, with gold letters gone soft at the corners, from a savings bank in Superior. Superior is sixty miles west of us, two counties over. We do not bank in Superior. We have banked in Fairbury since the day we were married.

Inside the cover somebody had stamped a date. Opened 3-14-86.

Under that, a typed name. Just the one. It was not mine.

On the front, in ballpoint, in a teller’s tidy hand, it said Book 7.

I turned to the last line that had any ink on it. It was from December, three weeks before. Interest posted. Balance.

$212,006.18.

I sat down on the lid of the chest freezer, in my coat, with my breath going up in front of the trouble light, and I read it again.