The Tapes That Came Back To Me

The box on the porch

I woke that Saturday the way the grieving wake, which is to say I did not feel rested and I did not want to get up.

I made my coffee by feel, which I was learning to do. I found the pot and the water and the right button with my hands.

Then I opened the front door to bring in the milk off the step, and my foot bumped something that was not the milk.

It was a box. A cardboard box, the kind that holds a case of canning jars, and it was heavy, and I had to crouch and feel the top of it.

Inside were tapes. Cassette tapes, a whole box of them, and even before I picked one up I could feel the edge of a label and the ink of a felt pen.

Somebody had labeled them by hand. The way I labeled mine.

I carried the box inside and set it on the kitchen table and I got out the old player, the gray one, the twin of the ones on the library shelf.

I put in the first tape by feel, and I pressed the button my fingers knew, and I waited, thinking maybe the state had sent me somebody else’s work to listen to.

A voice came out of that little speaker, and it was not a stranger.

It was a man’s voice, warm and a little rough, and he said, “Good morning, Opal. This here is the Harrison County news for Saturday. We figured it was our turn.”

And he read me the paper.

He read the front page. He read the obituaries, slow and careful, the way I taught. He read the school lunch menu, Monday chicken patty and corn, and I heard him smile through it.

I knew the voice. I could not place it for a second and then I could. It was Dennis, the boy I taught to read in the church basement thirty years ago, grown into a man with children of his own.

He read me the ballgame scores like they mattered to the whole wide world. The Bulldogs had won. He read every name.

I sat down at the kitchen table and I put my hand flat on the box of tapes, and I understood what I was holding.

The next tape was a woman reading the Psalms. It took me a moment, and then I knew her too. It was a woman I taught, who had been so shy as a girl she would not say her own name out loud in Sunday school.

Now her voice was steady and sure, reading me the twenty-third Psalm, and I thought my heart would come right out of my chest.