The Claim Tag in My Husband’s Coat
“A dollar.”
“I would not take it. He would not take it back. So it sat on the counter till he left, and when he was gone I put it in a cigar box.” He pointed with his chin to a shelf behind the radiator. “That is thirty-nine Marches. There is thirty-nine dollars in there. I never spent one.”
“There is more,” Ellis said gently. “May I show you?”
He went to the end of the long wall of cases, to a shelf higher than a man his age should reach, and brought a wooden step stool from behind the counter. I half stood, afraid for him. He waved me back and climbed it one slow rung at a time.
“I have been up and down these steps once a week since Reagan was president,” he said. “Do not fuss.”
He took down a case. It was small, a three quarter size, covered in black fabric gone gray at the corners. A strip of masking tape on the lid said Doerr in Ellis’s printing, and tied to the handle with white string faded to the color of bone hung a pink tag. Number 1146.
He set it on the glass counter and stood a moment with both hands flat on either side of it. Then he wiped 40 years of dust off the lid with his cardigan sleeve and slid it across to me.
“Understand, it is no Stradivarius,” he said. “It is a school fiddle out of a catalog, worth about what he paid. Nobody ever came asking, and I would not have sold it to them. Every March when his Saturday came round I took it down and wiped it and slacked the strings so the neck would not warp, and put it back. That is all. Some years I talked to it. A man alone in a shop will talk to anything.”
He undid the latches himself and lifted the lid.
Faded green velvet. The violin lay in it, small and honey colored, with a dark curl of varnish worn pale on the shoulder where a child’s chin had rested. A seam ran across the top, thin as a hair, glued so well I would not have seen it if he had not said.
And taped to the underside of the lid with yellowed cellophane tape was a small envelope, the kind that comes with a thank you card. On the front, in square pencil printing:
For Rachel Doerr.
I knew that hand. I had been reading it on grocery lists and birthday cards for nearly half a century.
I lifted the tape. It came away soft as old skin. The flap was not sealed. Inside was a single sheet of lined paper folded in thirds, and on it Merrill had written five lines.
Rachel,
This is yours and it is paid for. Nobody owes anybody. You do not need to know who. Play something at church.
A neighbor
I read it twice. Then I put it down on the glass and put my face in my hands, there in the dust and the valve oil and the smell of burning coffee, and I said the only prayer that came, which had no words in it at all.