The Claim Tag in My Husband’s Coat
I am not proud of the first thing I thought, so I will say it plainly and get it over with.
I thought of another woman.
It was a fool’s thought. Merrill Gaines sent back a restaurant bill once because the waitress had been too kind to him and he did not want me to wonder. But he was dead, and I could not ask him, and a silence that long grows things. At two in the morning that week I sat up in the kitchen and prayed, which is what I have done at two in the morning since I was nine years old.
I said, Lord, I do not know what this is. If it is something I should let lie, then let me let it lie. If it is something I am supposed to go and see, You will have to make me brave.
I got no answer that night. The next ordinary thing was the telephone.
The number on the tag was a four digit one, the way they used to print them. I tried it with every prefix I could think of. A recording told me it was not in service. Pastor Leland had known Merrill for twenty years and had sat with me in the hospital, and he had never heard of any music store. Merrill’s brother in Oklahoma said, “Merrill? Music?” and laughed until he coughed. The man at the co-op who had worked beside Merrill eleven years said Merrill never mentioned Tipton Falls except for the sale barn.
“The sale barn,” I said.
“Tool swap every March. Second Saturday. He went every year.”
Now I want you to understand something. For 40 years, on the second Saturday in March, my husband had put on his barn coat, taken a jar of my plum jam off the cellar shelf, and told me he was going to the swap at Tipton Falls to look at tools. He always came home by suppertime with nothing. “Nothing worth hauling,” he would say, and wash his hands and eat.
I had never counted the jars. But I remembered at that table that my plum jam ran short every March, and I used to blame the grandkids.
Elaine looked the shop up on her laptop that weekend. There was nothing, no website, no listing. Then a scan from the county paper, one inch of type on a page of auction notices: Harmon Music and Repair closes its doors Saturday, April 2, 1988, after 23 years on Main Street.
“Throw it out, Mom,” she said. “It’s gone. It’s been gone since I was in kindergarten.”
“They don’t take a man’s thirty-eight dollars and sell his thing,” I said. “Not without a good reason.”
“What thing?”
“That is what I am going to find out.”
The only man who could have told me was in the cemetery behind Zion.
Tipton Falls is twenty-six miles from our kitchen. Two towns over, as we say. You go east on the county road past the Zion Lutheran cemetery, through Cobb Ridge, through Wendell, and then the land begins to roll and the cornfields stand in stubble like the bristles of a brush. It was the first Saturday in November, the sky a bright flat blue. I held the tag in my right hand all the way, the way you would hold a child’s hand in a parking lot.