What the Scrap Pile Was Really For
“Madam Mayor, I’d like to enter something into the record,” Opal said. “It will take about ten minutes. And Marvin Krumm, I need you to sit back down.”
“Opal, don’t.”
“The pile’s about to be gone, Marvin. That was the deal. Sit.”
I sat. I don’t know how. My legs did it without me.
Then I heard the double door at the back of the room, the one the janitor props open for the Rotary on Tuesday nights. It opened, and somebody came in holding it with one hand, and behind that person came another, and behind that one another.
They kept coming.
A tall young woman in blue scrubs with a hospital badge clipped to her pocket. A big man in a lineman’s reflective jacket with a hard hat under his arm. A woman with a baby on her hip. A girl in an Eastern Illinois sweatshirt who looked about twenty and stopped just inside the door like she was afraid she was in the wrong place. A bearded fellow in a feed-store cap. A man in a suit coat and no tie, who had clearly come straight from somewhere else.
They stood along the back wall and down the side aisle because there weren’t enough chairs. They did not look at the council. They did not look at each other much. They looked at me.
I counted eighteen. I counted three times.
Joanne’s hand had gone completely still on my elbow.
“These are the people,” Opal said, “that this pile put through college.”
The list
Opal opened the tin box. Under Marlene’s cards there was a second stack, newer, typed, each with a name and a photograph clipped to the corner and a line of writing underneath, the way a teacher writes on the back of a report card.
“Marvin Krumm has hauled scrap metal in this county for nineteen years,” she said. “He did not do it because he could not throw things away. Every August for nineteen years he took what that truck earned and paid the first year of college for one young person from this school district. He has never met a single one of them. He asked me not to tell him their names, and I did not.”
The room was so quiet I heard the radiator under the window tick.
“This is the list.”
She read it.
“Tessa Marburger. Lake Land, then nursing at Southern. She is a registered nurse in the emergency room at Fayette County Hospital.”
The tall woman in blue scrubs lifted her chin, and I knew her. It took me a second. I had looked at that face upside down from a gurney in March.
She was the nurse who held my hand in the hallway while they cut my pant leg. Mr. Krumm, you stay with me, you’re doing fine. She had come to see me twice at the rehab place, and I had taken it for kindness from a stranger.
“Dustin Pohlman. Kaskaskia College, then the lineman’s program. Journeyman lineman, Ameren Illinois.”
The man with the hard hat nodded at the floor.
“Marisol Vega. Eastern Illinois. Third grade at Vandalia Elementary.”
The woman with the baby.
“Caleb Strothmann, large animal veterinarian in Effingham. Hannah Roper, physical therapist. Eli Hartman, who teaches welding to farm kids at Kaskaskia. Amber Tolliver, nurse practitioner. Jake Nowak, a Fayette County deputy. Shawna Pickett, dental hygienist. Mike Kellerman, an accountant in Springfield with two daughters. Dottie Weller, a caseworker with the state who gets called in the middle of the night to places nobody else wants to go.”