The Tablet I Kept for Twenty Two Years

The Twelve Thousand

On the seventeenth of June, a Wednesday, I stopped at the shop to tell my father the church and the hall and the caterer wanted their deposits, and that Ingrid’s folks were stretched. I had not planned to ask. I had been saving for the wedding myself, and it was going to be tight, and I had a speech in my head about how I did not mind that it was tight.

He said, “How much?” I said, “Dad, no.” He wrote a check at the welding bench, for twelve thousand dollars, with the shop radio going. I tried to hand it back. He folded my fingers over it. “Boy,” he said, “go get married.”

I paid the church, the hall and the caterer their deposits out of it, seventy-four hundred dollars in all. Twelve days later, on the twenty-ninth of June, I learned that the store was six weeks from collapse, and I did not touch the rest of the money. I want you to know that. For five weeks I did not touch it.

After Soren died, Marit could not face a crowd. She told me, in her kitchen, with her hands flat on the table, that she could not stand up in a church in front of two hundred people and be looked at. She asked if we could be married quietly. I said yes. I would have said yes to anything. And then she said the other thing, which I will not hold against her, because she was a widow of three weeks and she was holding a household up with both hands.

“Dane, I can only manage six,” she said. “Will you make the list?”

I made the list. Marit and Ingrid’s aunt and uncle. Two friends from the cooperative, Rollie and Tuck. And myself, and Ingrid. I looked at the list for a day. I did not put my father on it.

I will tell you why, and I will tell you without making it prettier than it is. I was afraid. I was afraid he would be asked to say something, or sign something, or read the little printed program the magistrate gives you. I was afraid of a hundred small moments in a room full of Marit’s family, who are quiet, kind, well-read Norwegians and who would see a man hold a page too close to his face. I was afraid they would see him. I thought I was protecting him. I was protecting myself from watching it.

And I was afraid of the other thing too. The deposits we could not get back were seventy-four hundred dollars. The church kept fifteen hundred. The hall, nineteen hundred. The caterer, four thousand. That was what the wedding my father had paid for had turned into, a pile of receipts, and I knew that if I told him, he would have said, “Forget it, boy,” and I would have had to stand in the shop and watch him forgive me.

So I did not tell him. On the morning of the third of August, before Soren ever walked down to open the store, I took the forty-six hundred dollars that was left of my father’s check and paid the wholesaler, with Ingrid beside me. Soren died that afternoon, never knowing the account was clear. Marit found the ledger the day after the funeral and asked me to tell nobody how close it had been, and I said I would. I saved the store with my father’s money, and I told nobody, because Marit asked me to and because I could not have borne his face.

That is where the twelve thousand went. Seventy-four hundred dollars to people I never saw, for a wedding that never happened, and forty-six hundred to a wholesaler in Des Moines to keep the lights on in a hardware store. I owe my father every dollar of it. I have not paid him one.