The Checkbook My Son Kept for Me

The Second Saturday in November

The Rexford Volunteer Fire Company social hall holds a hundred and sixty people if the fire marshal looks the other way. The co-op dinner has been held there since 1962, and it smells of chicken pot pie, coffee, and the floor wax the auxiliary puts down every November.

There were a hundred and forty members that night. I know because Roscoe read the count into the microphone, and I could hear the paper plates and folding chairs and the low talk of farmers who only see one another twice a year.

Josie held my arm. She wore her good navy dress and guided me past the long tables of pot pie and slaw, red beet eggs and shoofly pie, and every few steps somebody put a hand on my shoulder and said, “Lloyd,” as if we were at a funeral.

Delmar and Roscoe sat at the head table. Pauline Strawser was at table six with her husband. She did not look my way. I felt her not looking.

Darren sat at table nine with Tricia and three men from his crew, Tyler Fry and two others, all in their good flannel shirts. My son wore a pressed white collar, and he had cut himself shaving, Josie whispered, a little place by his jaw.

He saw me come in. I know he did, because the low talk at table nine stopped, and then it started again.

We ate. I do not remember one bite of the pot pie. I am told it was very good.

Roscoe stood after the pie. The microphone gave a thin shriek, and he waited it out the way he has for forty years.

“We have the treasurer’s report, which is longer than you want and shorter than it should be. We have the patronage refunds. And we have one seat on the board to fill.”

He looked at me. I do not know how I know that.

“That seat was Lloyd Eshelman’s for thirty-one years. His son, Darren Eshelman, has been put forward. Darren is a fine excavator, and he has dug half the ponds in this room.”

There was warm laughter and a little clapping, and my son lifted a hand from table nine.

“Before we vote,” Roscoe said, “Lloyd has asked for the floor.”

My knees did not want to hold me. Josie rose with me and stayed at my elbow, and when I reached the little stage she let go, and I stood alone with a manila envelope. It held eleven pages in large print, and I could not read a word of them.

“Thank you, Roscoe,” I said. My voice sounded small in that big hall, like a man calling down a well. “I will not keep you long, and I am not here to stop anybody being elected.”

I turned my face toward table nine.

“Many of you know my eyes have gone. For two years my son Darren has read me my mail, my bills, and every paper I have had to sign. He has been patient and he has been kind.”

Nobody moved. I could not hear a fork.

“I got some papers from my bank this month. I cannot read them. I would like him to read them to me, if he will.”

I held out the envelope toward the sound of the room.

“He used to read me feed tickets standing on a milk crate,” I said, “when he was seven.”

A chair slid back at table nine.

Darren stood with his napkin still in his hand. The room went so quiet I could hear the coffee urn ticking at the back wall.