The Tapes That Came Back To Me

The last good day at the desk

I had maybe three months of useful sight left, and I decided to spend them doing the only thing I knew how to do.

I went in Tuesday and Friday like always. I read bigger print when I could, the obituaries blown up on the library copier so I could catch them at the edge of my eye.

Paula, the librarian, started sitting with me those last weeks. When I lost my place she would touch the line with her finger and I would find it again by feel and by her help.

I did not tell my listeners my eyes were going. I did not want their Tuesday to turn into a sad thing. The county was still being read, and that was what mattered.

But a careful listener can hear a thing. My pace slowed. I cleared my throat more. I spelled more words out, maybe because part of me was holding on to each one.

The last day I read alone, with no help, was a Friday in October.

I remember it because the maples on the square had gone that deep red, and I stood at the window of the back room and looked at them, and I could see the color but not the shape of a single leaf.

I read the paper that day as slow and as good as I ever did. I read the ballgame. I read a wedding announcement. I read a chapter of the Gospel of John for the Sunday tape.

I read, “The light shineth in darkness, and the darkness comprehended it not.”

My voice did not break on it. I had practiced not letting it break.

I labeled the tapes with Harold’s felt pen on the string. HARRISON CO NEWS, the date, side one, side two. My hand knew the letters even when my eye could not check them.

I put them in the mailer. I set them on the counter. I turned off Harold’s lamp.

And I went home believing, all the way down in my chest, that I had read my county out loud for the last time.

I did not make a speech about it. I did not call anybody. I just drove home in the dusk with the headlights of the oncoming cars blooming into stars I could not focus.

I made myself a supper I mostly could not see. I sat in Harold’s chair. I told the empty house I had done my best for nineteen years and it would have to be enough.

I did not know that while I sat there grieving, all across Harrison County, the microphone I had taught a hundred hands to hold was already being passed from house to house.

I did not know that the people I thought I was leaving in the dark had been planning, for weeks, to carry the light back to me.