What the Scrap Pile Was Really For

She went on. A pharmacist. A band director. A speech therapist. A mechanical engineer at the plant in Decatur. A firefighter and paramedic on the Vandalia crew. The agriculture teacher at Ramsey, who stood up in his feed cap and sat back down.

“Cody Reinhardt is in the Navy and could not be here. He sent a letter, and with the Mayor’s leave I will read it into the record.”

It was six lines in a young man’s blocky hand. He wrote that he had grown up in a house where nobody went anywhere, that he was writing from somewhere on the water he wasn’t allowed to name, and that he had always wanted to thank “the friend of the school.”

“Kendra Lutz is a junior at Eastern Illinois, studying elementary education,” Opal said. “She is the nineteenth.”

The girl in the sweatshirt put her hand halfway up, like she was in class.

I realized I was holding my breath.

“Mr. Krumm’s checks totaled one hundred eighteen thousand, four hundred and forty dollars,” Opal said. “He gave no more than he earned and no less. He started with the sale of a hay rake that belonged to his wife’s father, and he told me that day what he told me every year after, that he did not want to be thanked.”

She looked at me for the first time since she’d started.

“I am sorry, Marvin. I am breaking my word, and I know it. But you said I could tell them when the pile was gone, and I will not stand here and let this city haul it away in a dump truck and send you a bill for eleven thousand dollars. I would rather break the promise and ask your forgiveness. I have been asking it of God and Marlene since September.”

There was a sound behind me, a wet, honest sound like a calf in a pen. I turned. It was Verl Ritter. He had come in late and was standing against the wall in his Carhartt jacket, crying like a boy, one big hand over his mouth and the tears running down into his gray beard.

“Nineteen years,” he said through his fingers. “He came in my yard for nineteen years and I thought he was just a good customer.”

Nobody else was crying. I want to be accurate about that. The nurse had her eyes fixed on a spot above the mayor’s head. The lineman was working his jaw. Joanne stared at the floor with her lips pressed together. The room held, the way a room does when it has forgotten how to be loud.

The mayor was the one who finally spoke. She took off her glasses and set them on the table.

“I think,” said Gail Bergmann, “that Item 6 should be tabled.”

“So moved,” said Alderman Gebhardt, who had made the first motion, and whose voice had gone rough.

“Second.”

“All in favor.”

It was a roar. I had never heard a city council roar.