The Coffee Table That Came to My Porch

The last morning I drove to the co-op, I ran over my own mailbox. I was going eleven miles an hour. I want that on the record, because eleven miles an hour is how fast a man drives when he already suspects something and is hoping the suspicion will be wrong.

It was the third week of October, a little after five in the morning, and a fog had come up out of the creek bottom the way it does in our part of Russell County, thick enough that the headlights lit the fog and nothing past it.

My lane is a quarter mile of gravel between two rows of limestone fence posts, the kind our grandfathers cut out of the ground by hand and stood on end because there was never a tree to make a post from.

At the road, the mailbox post was where it had always been, and I put the right front fender into it anyway.

The box went over with a flat tin sound. The post folded like a man sitting down. I stopped, and the engine kept running, and I sat in the dark with my hands on the wheel and understood that the thing I had been not-saying to myself since spring had finished saying itself.

My name is Ervin Mattson. I am seventy-eight years old. I farmed wheat and milo on six hundred and forty acres outside Lucas, Kansas, until my knees and my accountant agreed it was time to rent the ground to the Hammond boy down the road.

I buried my wife, Lorraine, nineteen months before that morning.

For nineteen months, the only thing that got me out of bed was a round oak table in the back room of the co-op, and the men who sat around it at six o’clock.

I should tell you about the table, because nothing else in this story makes sense without it.