The Claim Tag in My Husband’s Coat

“For children in the band who could not pay. I told him I did not have a program.” Ellis’s mouth twitched. “He said, ‘Then start one, and put me down for it, and tell the girl it was a program.’ And he laid a twenty and a ten and a five and three ones on that glass, in a stack, the way a man lays down his last card.”

“I would have done it for twenty,” said Ellis. “He would not hear of it. I glued that top from the inside with hide glue, a little cleat at a time, and it took a week to cure. The new bridge blank had to come from a supplier in Chicago, and that took another three. It was done the last week of April.”

“He came for it that Saturday with the bread sack to carry it home in. He meant to set it in the pew beside her the first Sunday in May, with a note he had written.” He stopped. The ball game murmured on. “But he had been out to the Pettit Road on his way over, and the house was dark.”

I remembered every day of it. In 1985 the farm crisis came down on Iowa like a hand. Land that had sold for two thousand dollars an acre in 1980 would not bring eight hundred. Every Saturday that spring and summer there was an auction somewhere, men in clean caps standing with their arms folded, nobody bidding against the neighbor, nobody saying a word.

“The Doerrs went the Sunday after Easter,” I said. “Wilbur packed the truck after church and drove out in the dark. The bank held the sale in May. Nobody heard from them again.”

“Do you know why he went in the dark?”

“Shame,” I said. And then, because it was true, “Pride.”

“The same thing. Merrill was at that sale, in the back, with his hands in his pockets. He told me he stood there thinking the violin was on a shelf in Tipton Falls and her daddy’s tools were going for ten cents on the dollar and nobody knew where they were living. He tried to find them. He drove to Wilbur’s brother in Nebraska. They had moved on. He wrote letters, and they came back. He called every Doerr in the Nebraska phone books.”

I put my hand flat against my breastbone.

“There was a long distance bill that fall, Ellis. Sixty-four dollars. I asked him who in this world he had been calling, and he said it was about a tractor part.” My voice cracked. “Sixty-four dollars was nearly all we had. I did not speak to him for two days.”

Ellis said nothing, which was the kindest thing he could have said.

“He never told me. I was cross with him and he never said a word.”

“I asked him the same thing, one March,” Ellis said. “I said, ‘Merrill, why not tell your wife? She would have helped you hunt.’ And he said something I have thought about every day since. He said, ‘Ellis, it is not a thing I did. It is a thing I have not finished. A man does not tell his wife he is halfway.'”

“He thought it did not count,” I said.

“I believe he did. Because he had not found her. And in 1992 Wilbur’s brother died, and after that there was nobody left to ask. The girl would be grown by then, married, with a name he could not guess. So he asked me to keep it. ‘Put it on the high shelf and write my number on it, and if she ever turns up you will know what to do.’ And he came back the next March, the second Saturday, with a jar of your jam and a dollar bill for the storage.”