The Claim Tag in My Husband’s Coat
Ellis stood by me the whole time. After a while he laid a big warm hand on my shoulder.
“He wrote that in the parking lot,” he said finally. “On the back of a seed company envelope. I saw him lick the flap and then not seal it. He said, ‘If I seal it I will never be able to change it.’ And then he said, ‘Leave off the name. She will wonder who. Let her wonder. It does the Lord no good to be thanked.'”
I tried to pay him, of course. I took out my checkbook and said, “Ellis, 40 years of storage, the care you took. Name it.”
He put his hand on the checkbook and pressed it shut.
“Mrs. Gaines, your husband paid me a dollar a year and I would not take it. That is a man who understood what the shelf was worth. I will not insult him.” He took down the cigar box, found the top bill, creased in thirds, from March of 2024, and put it in my hand. “That one is the freshest. You keep it. The rest I will leave until we know what to do with them. I thought maybe a fund, for a child who needs a bridge or a string.”
“A program,” I said.
“A program,” said Ellis Harmon, and smiled all the way.
I carried the violin out to the car myself and set it on the passenger seat. Because it seemed wrong to let it ride loose, I pulled the seat belt across it and clicked it in. The old man watched from the sidewalk with his cardigan buttoned to the neck and the wind lifting his hair.
Somewhere past Wendell the sun came out from behind a cloud and laid a long gold rectangle across the dash, and the hair-thin seam in the violin’s top caught the light for one second and shone. I pulled over on the shoulder and sat with the hazards on for a while.
It took nine days to find Rachel Doerr, and I would like to say I did it by prayer alone. The truth is I did it with Pastor Leland, a church directory, and a daughter who is better with a computer than I will ever be.
Monday morning Leland let me into the file cabinet at the church office. The 1984 pictorial directory was there in a green cloth binding, every family on the chancel steps in their good clothes. Doerr, Wilbur and Imogene. Rachel, age 10. Daniel, age 7. Wilbur stood stiff as a post with a hand on each child’s shoulder. Rachel wore the blue dress, not smiling, because she was holding her breath the way children do for a camera.
Elaine called that night and I told her all of it. She was quiet so long I thought we had been cut off. Then she said, in a small voice I had not heard since she was twelve, “Mom, I am coming down Friday. I will find her.”
She did, in two evenings and three tries at the wrong Rachel Doerr. The right one was in a notice from the Kearney paper in 2011: Imogene Marie Doerr, 74, formerly of Cobb Ridge, Iowa, died peacefully. Survived by a son, Daniel, of Omaha, and a daughter, Rachel Kovar, of Kearney, Nebraska. Preceded in death by her husband, Wilbur.
Rachel Kovar, Elaine found, was the school secretary at an elementary school in Kearney. I called the office that Friday at ten minutes to three.