The Name in the Thursday Paper

Wyatt was five days old the Thursday the Courier came. Josh brought it in from the mailbox at the end of our lane with frost still on the bill of his seed cap, and he set it on the kitchen table next to my coffee.

“Mom said she sent something in,” he said. “Page six, I think.”

I had Wyatt on my shoulder and one hand free. I opened the paper flat with that hand, past the school board minutes and the sale bills, and found the births column.

There were two births that week. The first was a Schroeder girl from out by the county line. The second had a picture with it, the one Sharon took on her phone in the hospital in Decorah, Wyatt red and squinting in the striped hospital blanket.

Under the picture it said: Harold Wyatt Brandt, born March 7, 7 pounds 9 ounces, son of Josh and Kelsey Brandt. Named for his late grandfather, Harold Brandt. Submitted by proud grandmother Sharon Brandt.

I read it twice. Then I read it a third time, slowly, the way you read a word on a test you are sure you spelled right.

“Josh,” I said.

He was at the sink running water into the thermos for the barn. He turned around and saw my face and came and stood behind my chair and read it over my shoulder.

He did not say anything for a long time. The furnace kicked on. Wyatt made the little creaking noise he made before he woke up hungry.

“That’s not his name,” Josh said finally, like the paper might hear him and fix it.

“No,” I said. “It isn’t.”

The name we picked

We had picked Wyatt James eight months before. We picked it on the tailgate of Josh’s truck at the county fair, eating a pork chop on a stick, the week after the ultrasound told us it was a boy.

Wyatt because we both liked it and nobody in either family had it. James for my grandpa, James Kessler, who taught me to drive a stick shift in his Ford in the elevator lot and still calls me Kelly Belly at 86 years old.

We told everybody. We told Sharon at Thanksgiving, at her table, over the green bean casserole. She said, “Wyatt,” the way you say the name of a town you have never been to, and passed the rolls.

Josh’s middle name is Harold. So was his father’s first name, and his grandfather’s. I knew that. I had married into it. But nobody had ever said a word to me about a rule.

Wyatt came on a Saturday morning in Decorah, forty minutes from home, after eleven hours and a nurse named Pam who could have run a cattle sale with her voice. Sharon came that afternoon and held him by the window for almost an hour.

“He looks like a Harold,” she said, rocking him.

I laughed. I was tired and stitched and happy, and I thought she was teasing. Josh laughed too. Nobody at that window understood what she meant except Sharon.

Josh went home Sunday night to sleep, and Monday morning he was back at the barn by five. He manages a 2,400-head finishing barn for the Hagens east of town, and a barn that size does not care that you just had a baby.

The fans have to run and the feed lines have to run and somebody has to walk the pens.

Monday was the morning Sharon called the Courier. The deadline for Thursday’s paper is Monday at noon. I know that now. I did not know it then, and I did not know she knew it.