The Tuesday Night Bingo Ban That Backfired
His mouth worked. He said nothing.
I picked up my thermos. I did not pick up my daubers, my lucky one with the pink cap or the spare. I think I wanted to leave something behind so I would have to come back.
Then I walked out to my Buick and sat behind the wheel with my purse in my lap and the dome light on, and for a minute or two I could not make my hands quit shaking. That is the part nobody tells you about handling a thing with grace. It doesn’t mean it doesn’t hurt. It only means you wait to cry until the car door is shut.
I should tell you what that room was to me, or none of the rest will make sense.
In the spring of 2001, bingo at Post 318 was dying. Six players, a caller named Delbert who fell asleep between numbers, and a tin of stale pretzels. Walt sat on the house committee then. He came home one night and said, “They’re going to quit Tuesdays, Max. There’s not enough in it.”
I was the bookkeeper at the Elevator. I asked to see the numbers, and I said, “That’s a day and a half of work to get right.” And Walt, who had known me twenty-five years by then and would have followed me into a river, said, “Then I’ll tell them you’ll do it.”
So I took over the table by the door. I made a cash box out of a Folgers can with a slot cut in the lid. I baked lemon bars, because a hungry crowd is a loyal crowd. That summer Walt went to a farm auction outside Logansport and came home with a hand-cranked wire bingo cage, the old kind, with wooden balls and a brass handle. He paid forty dollars for it and donated it to the Post without telling me until it was sitting on our kitchen table, shining.
“It’s got a good sound,” he said. “A machine can’t do that sound.”
He was right. A cage of wooden balls rumbles. When it stops and Orville reaches in, you can hear forty people breathe in at once.
We had eleven players that first Tuesday, forty by the second year. The Post cleared a little over two hundred and fifty dollars on a good night, and over twelve months that came to Christmas baskets on sixty-one porches in Harlan County, and the flags on Main Street every Fourth of July.
Walt died six years ago in March. It was his heart, and it was quick. The first Tuesday after the funeral I went back, because I didn’t know what else to do with my hands. I stood in the parking lot a long time thinking, I’ll cry on somebody’s cards. But I went in, carrying the lemon bars, and nobody said a word. Bev Tanner, who has not kept a secret since 1987, got me a coffee and set it on my table. Rudy put out my chair. And Orville, who had sat across from Walt for nineteen years of Tuesdays, quietly moved Walt’s chair six inches to the left, so it would not look like anybody was supposed to sit in it and would not look like an empty place either. It looked like a chair that had always been a little to the left.
Nobody has sat in it since. Nobody has ever said we couldn’t.