The Widow’s Coffee Can
Ina Dunagan lives a half mile down from the church in the farmhouse she and Orville moved into the week they married, in 1962.
She met me at the screen door in an apron with flour up to the elbow. She had been making dumplings. She is a woman who makes dumplings in the middle of any sorrow.
I told her all of it at her kitchen table. I told her what Warren said, and what the deputy said, and what Ardith had in her sunroom.
“I never did like that word,” she said finally. “Managed.”
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“No, ma’am.”
“Orville managed one thing in his life. A cattle herd. And he never once called it managing. He called it taking care.”
She got up. She walked to the top shelf of the pantry and brought down a coffee can, a red Folgers can with the plastic lid, and she set it on the table between us.
On the side of the can, in Orville’s square block letters, was a strip of masking tape that said Furnace.
“Open it,” she said.
I lifted the lid. It was empty. It smelled like coffee and old pennies.
“Twelve years,” Ina said. “Every Saturday night he emptied his pockets into that can. He said, one of these days that old Octopus is going to quit and somebody will need to buy a new one, and I will not have the church go cold over it.”
I could not say anything.
“It was full of nickels, dimes and quarters, and a few dollar bills folded very small. I counted it the day after the funeral,” she said. “Two hundred twelve dollars and forty cents. I poured it in the jar myself. That was the first thing in the jar.”
“I did not know that.”
“Nobody did. He didn’t want it known. He thought it was foolish, a man saving dimes for a furnace.” She smiled for the first time. “It’s the only foolish thing he ever did, and I loved him for it.”
“Vernon, I want you to hear me. I don’t want Warren Teague put in the paper. I don’t want him in the courthouse. I don’t want him shamed in front of his mother.”
“Ina, he took your husband’s money.”
“I know what he took.” Her voice did not rise. “He took the furnace. He did not take Orville. Orville’s not in a bank account. Orville’s in the people who put money in a jar.”
I looked at the coffee can.
“What I want,” she said, “is the heat. And I want to know why, because a man doesn’t do a thing like that without a why, and I’d like to hear it from the man.”
“You’ll want to bring it to the church,” she said. “The quarterly meeting is the twenty-fifth. I want to speak.”