The Three Machinists Who Found Dennis’s Tools

Letting the Sale Run

I ran that sale. Hub told me to, and when a man like Hub tells you something, you do it. Two hundred people carried my husband’s life out of my yard in coffee cans and cardboard boxes, and I smiled, and thanked them, and made change at the card table. Kirk winked at me twice across the yard.

My son Greg called from Columbus at noon. He would have driven up, but he had a big audit at his accounting firm, and I had told him not to come. I did not tell him what had happened. Greg has his father’s temper and none of his patience. I told him on Sunday, once I could do it calmly.

That evening I walked to the empty pole barn and stood where the lathe had been. On the concrete lay a clean rectangle with a ghost of oil around its edge. The light over the lathe had been burning since the night of the stroke in July, because switching it off felt like deciding something. I stood there a long time. Then I reached up and pulled the string.

Paragraph Six

On Monday I drove to Coshocton to see Alice Bender, who did Dennis’s will and mine. She has a little brick office on Walnut Street with a fern that has outlived two of her husbands.

I laid the contract and the check on her desk. She read paragraph six twice, the way you check a stove you are afraid you left on.

“Burkhart Estate and Appraisal may offer any item to trade buyers, at its sole discretion and pricing, before the public opening,” she read aloud. “Nancy, did you read this before you signed?”

“I read the commission. He said the rest was standard.”

“It is standard,” Alice said. “That’s what makes it so clever.”

I told her I had already called the sheriff’s office on Sunday night. A young deputy had been polite to me for eleven minutes and then said it was a signed contract, so a civil matter.

“Here is where we stand. You signed. His prices were low, but he never has to prove it, because he can say he thought the market was soft. The tools are gone, so nobody can appraise them. My retainer is twenty-five hundred dollars, for a check in a year or more. I’d be taking your money to get you money, Nancy, and you would not get the tools.”

She was right, and I want that on the record, because people have told me since that I should have sued. What I wanted was a green lathe in a barn and a red box with a strip of tape on the third drawer. I did not want my husband’s name to become Exhibit Four.

So I drove home, and I did the only thing I could. I waited for three old men to call.