The Cash Box in Dad’s Closet

The man with the cold house

My father carried the mail for thirty-one years.

Rural Route 2 out of the Sawtell Flat post office, sixty-one boxes, ninety-four miles a day in his own pickup, a 1994 Ford with a bench seat and a heater that died in 1998. He retired at sixty-two with a carrier’s pension, a handshake and a sheet cake.

After that he ran twelve cows on forty acres and drank coffee at the Elkhorn Cafe at six every morning with the same four men. He never went farther from home than Idaho Falls. He never bought anything he could fix.

I grew up in a house where you put on a sweater before you asked to turn up the heat.

My mother, Ruth, used to say it for him. “Your father is not cheap,” she would say, dishing out potatoes. “He is saving for something he has not told me about yet.”

I thought it was a joke. She died twelve years ago, and I thought the joke died with her.

Every Christmas after that I sent him a space heater, the oil-filled kind with little wheels. Every January I found it in the garage, still in its box, stacked on the last one.

“I’m fine, Cal,” he would say. “I’m out in the barn half the day.”

“Dad, it is fifty-eight degrees in your living room.”

“It’s warm enough to sit in.”

I once offered to put in a new furnace and pay for it myself. He thanked me, said the old one worked, and changed the subject to my tire prices. I drove home furious and told Annette my father would rather freeze than let anybody help him.

I was right about that second part. I was wrong about every word around it.

He would not let anybody help him because he was busy helping everybody else, and he had decided the two could not happen at once.

The woman at the counter

The next morning I put the cash box on the passenger seat of my truck and drove into town.

The Sawtell Valley Rural Electric office sits on Main Street between the feed store and the barber, a low brick building with a drive-up window nobody has used since it was installed. Inside there is one long counter, two desks and a woman named Lorraine Fenske, who has worked there thirty-eight years.

She looked up when I came in. She looked at the cash box in my arms.

She took off her reading glasses and set them on the desk.

“Well,” Lorraine said. “I wondered how long it would take you.”

She turned the sign on the door to Back in Ten Minutes and pulled two chairs together by the window. Then she told me, in the voice of a woman reading a recipe, the thing I had come to learn.

The co-op mails a disconnect notice when an account is sixty days past due. It comes in a pink envelope, because somebody at a printing company thought that would help, and it goes out on a Thursday.

“Your father carried those,” Lorraine said. “Thirty-one years. Every pink one that went out on Route 2, he put in the sack himself and drove to the box himself, and he knew what it was every time.”

“He knew who was behind?”

“He knew who was behind, who was sick, who was out of work and who was too proud to say. He knew it by box number before he knew it by name.”