The Claim Tag in My Husband’s Coat
“I thought the shop closed,” I said. “There was a notice in the paper. 1988.”
“It did. The front of it.” He waved a hand at the long dim room. “Nobody was buying a trumpet in a town this size anymore, and I was tired of pretending. But the schools still needed their horns mended, and a man does not give up a bench he has stood at for 23 years. So I kept the key and I kept the Saturdays. I just stopped keeping the lights on for people who were not coming.”
There were two kitchen chairs by the stove at the back. He lowered himself into one with a hand on the radiator.
“You will want to know first if it is what you are afraid of,” he said.
“I do not know what I am afraid of.”
“Then I will say it plain. It is the best thing your husband ever did, and he thought it was the worst thing he ever left undone.” Ellis folded his hands. “Do you remember the Doerrs?”
It was like being asked about a word in a language I had stopped speaking.
“Wilbur and Imogene,” I said slowly. “On the Pettit Road. The quarter section north of Bender’s slough. Two children.”
“Rachel and Daniel.”
“Rachel played the violin.” I could see her. A thin girl of ten or eleven with a brown braid as thick as a wrist, standing at the front of Zion Lutheran at the Christmas program in her good blue dress, the little violin tucked under her chin like a baby bird. “She played ‘Silent Night.’ She was not good. She was very, very sweet.”
“In March of 1985 she was on the school bus coming home from her lesson in Wendell,” Ellis said, “and a boy shoved past her in the aisle. The case hit the corner of a seat. Cracked the top clear across and knocked the bridge off. She carried it home in both arms.”
“I remember she stopped playing. Her mother said it was a bad spell.”
“Wilbur Doerr was a proud man. Not the bad kind. The kind that would rather go cold than ask. He had a note at the bank and a hog barn he could not fill and a girl who needed thirty-eight dollars for a repair, and he said it would wait until fall.” Ellis smiled a little. “I know because your husband told me. He sat right here. March the ninth, a Saturday. He came in with a bread sack, and in the bread sack was a violin in pieces, wrapped in a flannel shirt like a casualty.”
I did not move.
“He said it belonged to a girl at church whose daddy would not take help. The night before, he had offered Wilbur a loan, and Wilbur looked him in the eye and said, ‘Merrill, I will not be anybody’s charity. Not yours. Not the Lord’s.’ And your husband said, ‘Mr. Harmon, I sat up all night thinking what you do for a man like that.’ The way he figured it, you do it where the man cannot see.”
“What did he do?”
“He asked if the shop had a program.”
“A program.”