The Footlocker Nobody Threw Away

The Brass Key

My father was a Staff Sergeant in the United States Army. He served in Vietnam in 1969, in the infantry, and came home with a Purple Heart and a Bronze Star and a left shoulder that ached whenever it rained.

He never talked about it, not once that I can remember, until I was grown. He ran a feed and seed counter in Alder Creek for thirty-one years. He coached my softball team and he was the one who could always get the stuck bolt out.

My mother died in 2014. After that he sold the house and moved to Elm Street, into one bedroom with a kitchen window that looked at the back of the Lutheran church. He took four things with him he would not part with. His chair, his coffee pot, his Packers blanket, and the footlocker.

“Don’t go through my drawers when it’s time,” he told me last Thanksgiving. He was carving, and he said it to the turkey. “Everything you need is in the footlocker.”

I laughed at him. I said, Dad, you are going to be around for twenty more years and you’ll bury me.

He said, “Jodi, I’m just telling you where it is.”

That was all. I put the brass key in my purse that Monday and I carried it down Elm Street like a person carrying a lit match, because it was the only piece of my father I had left that I could close my hand around.

My husband Ken drove up Monday night, straight from the plant in Eau Claire, still in his work boots. We stood on the sidewalk in front of the building where Dad’s mattress had been set out. Ken looked at the curb, and the street, and the neighbor’s lit window.

“Somebody has to have seen where it went,” he said.

We started at 1A.

Mrs. Haas

The woman in 1A was named Mrs. Haas. She was about eighty-five, in a cardigan, with a cane and a television going behind her. She had known my father for six years and she had not known he was dead until we knocked.

She sat down very slowly in her kitchen chair. She said, “Oh, Ray,” twice, to nobody.

Then she told us what she had seen, because she had seen all of it from her front window. A pickup had come early, and a young man had carried a mattress down the stairs with another man, and they had left it all at the curb in a row.

“And that green box,” she said. “Heavy. They had to go slow with it.”

“Did the truck take it?” Ken asked.

“The garbage truck came, a little before seven. The big one.” She turned her cane in her hands. “The man stopped in front of it. He stood there a long time. I thought he was reading something.”

“Reading?”

“I don’t know. He got down and looked at the end of it. Then the truck went around the corner, and my program came on, and I went in to the kitchen.”

We knocked on every door on Elm. Eleven houses and the church parsonage, in the dark, with a snapshot of my father I had carried in my wallet since 1983.

In the picture he was thirty-six, in a flannel shirt, grinning on the tailgate of a Ford with the footlocker beside him. I held it up to each porch light. Did you see this box? Does anyone know where it went?