The Stranger Who Tended Roy’s Grave

By sixteen Russ was rebuilding injector pumps. By seventeen his father was dead, a heart attack in the front room, and Russ was alone in that tin-roof house with nobody to sign his school papers. He was going to quit. He had a bag packed.

Roy found out. He went to the principal, Mrs. Kellerman, and the two of them sat at the school’s kitchen table and worked it out so that Russ could stay on in a spare room at the Kessels’ farm, a church family, until graduation. They never told him whose idea it was. He found out years later.

“May of 1993,” Russ said. “I walked across that stage in the high school gym. I looked out at all those folding chairs, every kid had a mother and a father and aunts. I’d told myself I didn’t care. And there was one man in the back row in a brown suit, clapping like his hands would split.”

I sat up. “A brown suit.”

“With a tie that didn’t match.”

“He wore his church suit on a Friday in May,” I said. I could see it. I had asked him that morning why he was dressed up, and he had put on his hat and said, “A boy needs somebody at a thing. I’ll be home for supper.” I had been peeling potatoes. I never asked which boy.

“I never thanked him,” Russ said.

He said it flat, looking out over the rows of stones. “I want you to understand that, Mrs. Hendricks. I never once said it. I went off to diesel school in Joplin that August with a duffel bag and that coat, and I told myself I’d come back when I was somebody. When I had a truck of my own. When I had something to show him. And then I started drinking, because I was Curtis Voss’s boy, and it turns out that’s a thing you can inherit without meaning to. I lost two jobs. I lost the first marriage. I stayed away from Alder Bend for twenty-two years because I couldn’t stand for the one man who had ever seen anything in me to see what I’d done with it.”

A crow landed on the cedar by his pickup and watched us.

“I’ve been sober nine years in January,” he said. “Charlene, my wife, the second one, she’s the reason. And there’s a rule in the program I go to. You write down everyone you hurt, and you make it right if you can. Roy wasn’t on the list because I’d hurt him. He was on it because I’d never paid him. I couldn’t think of anyone else I owed that much.”

“And you came down.”