The Caps My Wife Knit for the Ward
Our Arrangement
My name is Walt Boyd. I am seventy years old, and I have lived in Fayette County, Iowa my whole life except for the two years the Army borrowed me.
Margie and I married when I was twenty-six and she was twenty-four, in the Lutheran church in Westgrove, and we farmed my father’s ground until the ground got to be too much for the two of us.
Then I drove for the grain co-op for twenty-two years, and she kept the books for the vet clinic in town, and we did all right. We were never going to be rich and we never wanted it.
We never had children. That is a sentence I can say flat now, after all this time, but it took us years to be able to say it at all.
The doctor told us in our early thirties that it was not going to happen for us, and Margie cried in the truck in the clinic lot, and I did not have one word that helped. I just drove us home the long way.
So she found other things to pour it into. That was Margie all over. She did not sit in a sorrow. She got up and she moved.
She knitted from the time she was a girl. Her grandmother taught her on the porch of a farmhouse that is not even standing anymore, out on the Ridge Road.
By the time I married her she could knit without looking at her hands, watching the television, talking to you, visiting on the phone, her needles going the whole time like something that ran on its own power.
Our arrangement was simple and it lasted the whole marriage. She made the things. I carried the things.
She knitted mittens by the dozen for the grade school, and lap blankets for the nursing home over in Oelwein, and a sweater for every single baby that got born to anybody we knew or went to church with.
And I drove. I drove her and her grocery sacks all over this county for forty-four years, with the radio turned down low, and I waited out front, and I did not think of it as anything but being married to her.
I did not know, until she was gone, how much of her I had been hauling around in the cab of that truck. A man can carry a thing a long way and never once look inside the sack.