The Envelope I Carried Every Friday

The Buick in the church lot

Norene never said the name, but I had a good guess. There are not many widows at Walnut Grove Methodist with a mortgage on a house and a husband in the churchyard. The next Wednesday I found out my guess was right.

That Wednesday was the church supper. Ham and scalloped potatoes, a hundred and ten people in the fellowship hall, the long tables with the paper cloths. I carried the green beans out for Norene and set them on the line.

Afterward I went out to the truck for the empty casserole carrier Norene had left on the seat. It was getting dark, the way October does in Kansas, all at once.

There was a tan Buick sitting by itself at the far end of the gravel lot with its engine off and the dome light on.

Leota Mowbray was in the driver’s seat. She was 78 years old that fall. Her husband Kenneth had run a well-drilling rig out of a barn on County Road 160 for forty-four years, and he had been buried behind the church fourteen months before. She had a white envelope in both hands, and she was holding it flat against the steering wheel the way you would hold a hymnal.

She did not see me. I stood still between two pickups with a casserole carrier in my hand.

Leota read whatever was in that letter once more, front and back. Then she put her forehead down on the steering wheel and stayed that way.

She did not make any sound. That was the part that got me. Seventy-eight years old, she sat in the dark in a church lot with the dome light on and she did not make one sound, because somebody might hear her.

I went back inside and handed the carrier to my wife.

“Rudy, you look gray,” she said. “Are you coming down with something?”

“Just tired,” I said, and it was the first lie.

The sacks

I need to tell you about the sacks, because if I don’t, nothing I did next will make sense.

The winter of 1994 the plant laid off half the shop for nineteen weeks. Crawford lost a contract, and I was one of the men sent home. Bryce was a baby. Rochelle was not yet born. We had a mortgage that was eating us alive and an unemployment check that covered about half of it.

I did not tell my own mother how bad it got, or the pastor. Pride is a hard habit to break at 34.

One Thursday morning in January, Norene opened the front door to get the paper, and there was a brown grocery sack sitting on the porch, rolled down twice at the top.

Inside it was a ten-pound bag of flour, a tub of lard, a pound of coffee, a dozen eggs in a carton, and a canned ham. No note. No name. Just the sack.

The next Thursday there was another one.

Nineteen Thursdays in a row, until the plant called me back. A different sack each week, never the same thing twice, once a pair of mittens for Bryce stuffed down in the corner. We never saw a car. We asked at church and nobody owned up to it. For thirty-two years we did not find out who it was.

Norene still has every one of those sacks. She smoothed them flat and folded them and put them in the bottom drawer of the china hutch, nineteen of them, and she has never thrown out anything else on purpose in her whole life either.

I’ll tell you what that taught me. Whoever left them knew something I did not. They knew a man can take a ham from a stranger. He cannot take it from a neighbor he has to look at on Sunday.

So when I stood between those two pickups, I already knew how it had to be done. It had to be a sack on a porch.