The Tapes That Came Back To Me
The people on the other end of the tape
For a long time I did not know who was listening. I just mailed the tapes into the dark and trusted they landed somewhere.
Then one day a letter came to the library, typed by somebody’s helper, from a woman out near Gilman City who could not see.
She wrote that she had not left her house in two years. She wrote that my Tuesday tape was the only way she still knew her own town.
She wrote that she had cried when I read her brother’s obituary, because her family had not thought to tell her, and my tape got there first and gentlest.
After that the letters came now and then. I kept every one in a shoebox.
There was a man out on the county line who had lost his sight to the sugar diabetes. He wanted me to know he listened to the farm sales twice through, pretending he was still buying.
There was a woman in the nursing home in Bethany whose eyes had gone milk white with cataracts the doctors would not touch anymore. She told the aide my Scripture tape helped her sleep.
I started to understand that I was not just reading a newspaper. I was carrying people’s town to them when the town could not come itself.
And there was one listener I came to know better than all the rest, though it took me years to meet him.
His name was Virgil. He was a veteran, Vietnam, and he had come home with his eyes hurt in a way the army doctors never fully fixed. By his fifties he could not see at all.
Virgil lived alone on a little place south of town with a dog and a wood stove. He had no family left near. He got my tapes through the mail like the others.
But Virgil was different in a way I did not learn until much later. Virgil could not read.
Not Braille, not print, nothing. He had quit school in the sixth grade to work, back when a boy could do that, and he had hidden it his whole life.
When his sight went, he lost the one trick he had used to get by, which was having a sighted wife who read his mail to him. She had passed before him.
So my tapes were not a convenience for Virgil. They were the only words that came into his house at all. I did not know that yet. But I was about to.