The Nights I Never Told Them About

The lie I could wear

I needed a lot of money, and I needed it somewhere nobody who knew me would see me earn it.

There was a packing plant in McDonald County, forty minutes from our kitchen. They had advertised for night help on the radio for two years, and I had never listened. It paid $18.05 an hour, plus a dollar thirty-five for working nights, with overtime whenever a man wanted it. The job was boxing chicken on the packout line, in a room kept at 34 degrees.

I drove out on a Thursday and filled out the form at a picnic table by the front gate, because I didn’t want a paper with my name on it riding around in my truck. There was a line for an emergency contact. I couldn’t leave it blank. I wrote Darlene’s name and her cell number and the word wife, and I told myself nobody would ever read it.

A woman named Reba in the front office looked at my birth date and then at me. “You know it’s cold in there,” she said. “I farm,” I said. “I know cold.” She hired me on the spot, and I started the second Monday in November.

That left the lie.

I have a commercial driver’s license. I got it years ago to haul my own cattle to the sale barn, and I’ve kept it current ever since. It gave me a story I could wear, and it fit better than I wanted it to.

I told Darlene at supper. I said a man named Gene Dobbs out of Carthage ran overnight cattle loads to the stockyards and the packers, and his relief driver had quit. He needed somebody on nights, ten to six, five nights a week.

“At your age, Lyle?” she said.

“The money’s good,” I said.

That was true. It was the only true thing I said that whole supper. She looked at me a while, and then she said, “Well, take a coat,” and passed me the green beans.

There was no Gene Dobbs. I’d made up the name from a feed store calendar. A man can tell a lie in his own kitchen with very little trouble, I found, as long as the woman he’s telling it to has never once caught him in one.

I set rules for myself, like a man building a fence. The white boots and the smock never came into the house. They lived in a feed tote behind the seat of my truck, and I changed in the plant lot, in the dark, in all weather. I rented a post office box in Neosho for thirty-eight dollars a year, and every pay slip went there. Hal opened a separate account for me at the bank and my check went straight into it every Friday. He told me he didn’t like it. He did it anyway, and he never told a soul.

I explained the smell with the cattle trailers. The plant runs bleach through everything, and it gets in your skin. When I walked in at seven in the morning smelling like a swimming pool, I told Darlene I’d been washing out the trailers before I clocked off.

“They make you do that?” she said.

“Every night.”

“Well, that’s ridiculous,” she said, and poured my coffee.

Every January I took the W-2 off the pile of mail and did our taxes at the kitchen table, as I always had. I put the number on the form where it went. Darlene signed where I pointed, as she had for forty years. I want you to understand that part, because it is the one that sits on my chest. For forty years she signed where I pointed, and for two of them I pointed her at a lie.