“Your dad had good tools,” he told me. “Don’t you let anybody put these in a box lot. That’s a Snap-on wrench set. That’s a Craftsman socket set from when Craftsman meant something.”
Rita Mueller, who runs the funeral lunches at church, took on the cellar. There were four hundred and some canning jars down there, and she carried every one of them up those narrow stairs and washed them in tubs on the porch.
Pete Ackerman is thirty-four, and he farms our ground and his own. He came on a Sunday afternoon after church, looked at Dad’s old tractor sitting dead in the machine shed, and said, “Give me a month.”
Gene Ziegler has a skid steer, and the grove behind the barn had forty years of junk iron in it. Old disks, a rusted-out gravity wagon, fence wire, a bathtub. Gene spent three Saturdays on it and sold the scrap.
He brought me the check from the scrap yard in an envelope. Eight hundred and forty dollars, made out to the estate. “That’s your mother’s,” he said, and would not take a dollar for his fuel.
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Carl Hendricks taught shop at the high school for thirty years. He came with a roll of masking tape and a box of markers and a lot sheet, and he numbered things. Everything. Every lamp, every crock, every box of Christmas ornaments.
By the end Carl had put a lot number on nine hundred and twelve items. He kept the sheet in a three-ring binder that he guarded like it was the family Bible.
Nine of them. Ernie and Lois. Dale and Nancy. Stan. Rita. Pete. Gene. Carl. Not all of them came every week, but every Saturday there were at least four trucks in the yard.
Megan came most weekends too. She learned to run Carl’s lot sheet. She learned the difference between Depression glass and dime store glass. She learned that Rita Mueller swears, very quietly, when a jar breaks.
The attic
The attic was the worst of it. You got up there by a pull-down ladder in the upstairs hall, and it was a hundred and ten degrees by ten in the morning from June on.
Ernie would not let anybody else go up. “My knee doesn’t care whether it’s up a ladder or down one,” he said. “It hurts the same. You stand at the bottom and catch.”
So I stood at the bottom and caught. Forty years of boxes. Every Christmas decoration Mom ever bought. Every tax return since 1971. Ardell’s high school letter jacket. My prom dress, in a dry cleaner’s bag.
Somewhere in July, Ernie came to the top of the ladder holding a shoebox. He did not hand it down right away. He just held it, sweating, looking at the lid.
On the lid, in Mom’s handwriting, it said “Angie, first shoes.”
He handed it down. He did not say a word. He went back to the far end of the attic and started moving boxes again, louder than he needed to, so I could cry without anybody watching.
I still have the shoes. They are white leather, scuffed at the toes, with one lace missing. They sit on the shelf by my front door now, where I can see them.