The Footlocker Nobody Threw Away

The Four Dents

The first thing I saw in my father’s bedroom was four square dents in the carpet.

They sat about two and a half feet apart, deep and clean, the way a heavy thing leaves its mark when it has not moved for six years. The carpet around them was still damp and smelled of the rental shampooer.

I stood there in my coat. I had driven a hundred miles from Eau Claire that Monday afternoon to get my father’s good suit out of the closet so the funeral home could dress him.

The closet had no suit in it. The closet had no hangers in it. The rod was bare, and somebody had wiped down the shelf above it.

The kitchen drawers hung open and empty. The refrigerator door stood propped with a folded towel and the shelves were scrubbed white. A square of paler wallpaper showed where his calendar from the feed store had hung.

My father had died Sunday night in the hospital in Wausau, at seventy-nine years old, with his hand in mine and the Packers game still murmuring from a television in the hall. It was now about fifteen hours later, and there was no sign in apartment 2B on Elm Street that a man named Raymond Dvorak had ever lived there.

I walked back out to the landing. Downstairs, a door was open to the street, and a man in a canvas work coat was kneeling at the front lock of the building with a screwdriver.

A hand-lettered sign leaned against his leg. It said Apartment for Rent, One Bedroom, Heat Included, and it had a phone number.

“Excuse me,” I said. “Where are my father’s things?”

Section Fourteen

His name was Craig Steffen, and he owned the building. He was in his fifties, thick through the shoulders, with sawdust in the creases of his knuckles and a pencil behind one ear.

He did not stand up right away. He finished seating the cylinder, tried the key twice, and then he looked at me, and I will give him this, he did not look away.

“You’re the daughter,” he said. “I’m sorry for your loss. The hospital called me Sunday night.”

“Where are his things?”

“Section fourteen,” he said. “Death of a tenant, the lease ends, and the landlord has seven days to clear the unit. I don’t normally take the full seven.”

He said it quietly, the way a man reads a gas meter. There was nothing hot in it at all.

“My father died fifteen hours ago,” I said.

“I know that. I used one of the seven. I figured that was generous.” He said it without a smile, as if he were doing me a kindness by telling me the numbers.

I asked him what had happened to the furniture, and he told me. He and his nephew had started at midnight. The couch and the recliner had gone to the thrift store in Marshfield. The mattress and the dresser had gone to the curb. The food went in the dumpster, and the clothes went in contractor bags, and the bags went in the dumpster too.

“Monday is pickup on Elm,” he said. “Seven in the morning. It’s all gone.”

I asked about the footlocker.

I could see it as I said it. Olive drab, scuffed at the corners, a brass hasp on the front and a padlock on the hasp. My father’s name stenciled on the lid in white block letters, so faded that you had to tilt your head to the window to read it.