The Flags on My Mail Route Went Up

The notebook, and why I kept it small

I did keep one record. It was a green memo book with a rubber band around it, and it lived in the console of the Jeep. That last year it held twenty-three names.

Next to each name I wrote a few words only I could read. “E. Nolte, light off by 6, front curtain.” “H. Dowling, dogs fed? bowl on step.” “R. Kessler, tremor, hands.” “Wendells, the two of them, voices.”

Our postmaster, Gail Ferrell, told me once, about fifteen years ago, that there was a program, with a sticker for the box and a list that went to the office and a number to call. She said I ought to look into it. She was kind about it and she meant it.

I thanked her and never did.

The trouble with a list is that people on it know they are on it. They can feel it the way you feel somebody reading over your shoulder. I did not want Esther Nolte becoming a name on a form in the Steelville post office, to be checked on by a machine. I wanted her to be a woman who got her seed catalogs early.

A rural route is measured and paid for a certain number of hours, and the Postal Service had decided Route 3 took eight hours and ten minutes. Mine ran nine, most days, for twenty-nine years.

A carrier can put in for the extra time with a reason. I was never going to write “sat with Esther on the step” on a federal form. So I ate my lunch in the Jeep, at Esther’s, every day, in ten minutes instead of thirty, and I took the extra time out of my own pocket. I figured it was a bargain.

Joanne stopped asking around 2003 why I was home at four-thirty instead of three-thirty. By 2011 she was packing me a bigger lunch. She understood it better than I did.

Eleven flags

I told every one of them what the flag meant, and it happened eleven times.

One was a man named Lester Crum who got locked out in his own yard in his slippers in February and had been standing against his shed out of the wind for the better part of an hour. One was a rattlesnake on a porch in July, curled up at the foot of the door where Bonnie Kessler needed to go out to the clothesline. I killed it with a hoe and she gave me a jar of peaches, and Dwight said I would not have to come back, and I came back anyway.

One was Nell Wendell, who broke her wrist on a Saturday morning and walked out to the road, an hour before I came through, and put the flag up with her good hand. She was sitting on the grass beside the box when I got there. I have thought about her sitting there for twenty years.

Eight of the eleven were what you would call trouble, real trouble, the kind you call somebody about.

The other three I am not going to explain. All three were from people who wanted company and had no idea how to ask for it. I counted them as trouble anyway, because they were.