The Nurse Who Waited Thirty Years

The rest of it

“He wrapped us in the blanket he kept behind the seat for his dog,” Yvonne said. “It smelled like dog. He drove us nine miles to the clinic in Wendell with the flashers on and the whole route’s mail sliding around in the back. And he hummed. That hymn. Off key, the whole way, like he didn’t know he was doing it. I’ve hummed it every night for thirty years and never learned another word of it.”

So that was the hymn. That explained the hair on my arms.

“He said, ‘I’m Bernard. I carry the mail.’ Mama said, ‘I’ll never be able to pay you back,’ and he said, ‘Then don’t.'”

That sounded so exactly like him that I had to look at the floor.

“The clinic nurse wrapped me in another blanket. Mrs. Dutcher, an older woman with a crown of white hair. She said, ‘You’re alive, honey, and that’s the whole news.’ I decided right then, nine years old and shaking so hard my teeth hurt, that I was going to be her. Somebody who says that to a scared kid.”

Her mother lost the car and the job that depended on it. For six weeks that summer my father, who had no reason on earth to do it, took a nine-mile detour on his route every morning to pick Tamara up at her trailer and carry her to the sale barn. Yvonne rode along. She sat in the mail seat with the sorted letters in her lap, and he let her slide them into the boxes along Route 2.

“Lemuel Pratt used to give me a peppermint,” she said.

I remembered Lemuel Pratt and his peppermints. But I had been twenty-six that summer, married and living in Lincoln, and no one had told me any of it.

In the fall Tamara took a job in Salina and they moved away. Yvonne wrote my father one letter, in crayon, on a page torn from a school tablet, addressed “To Mr. Bernard the mailman who saved us, Wendell, Kans.” Her mother found his last name later, from the paper, and wrote it on every Christmas card after.

“It got to him,” I said. I was remembering something.

“A mailman got a letter addressed to a mailman.”

I did remember it then. It hung by the postmaster’s window at the Wendell post office for the rest of his years, thumbtacked between the wanted posters and the stamp calendar, a page of purple crayon gone pale in the sun. I had walked past it a hundred times. I had never once read it all the way through.

He had answered Yvonne herself only once. It was a store-bought birthday card, because it was what he could find at the counter that day, and he had crossed out the printed greeting and written four lines under it in his square pencil hand. She had them memorized. She said them to me across his sleeping body.

“Dear Yvonne. I got your letter. It is on my wall at the post office. Stay out of the creek. Your friend, Bernard.”

“Under that he put a five-dollar bill,” she said. “And a note: Buy yourself something yellow.”

“I’ve carried that card thirty years. Through nursing school. Through Mama’s cancer. Through my divorce. It’s been through the wash twice. I touched it before every shift. I thought, if I ever walk into a room and he’s there, I want it on me. And I put his name in my prayers every night, his and Mama’s, right next to each other.”