The Mailbox That Would Not Move

I do not know who started it. I suspect Ingrid. On Monday when Dad walked down for the mail, there were two letters in his box with stamps on them that were not his. One was that couple’s electric bill. The other was a birthday card from their granddaughter to her other grandma in Fergus Falls. The flag was up.

They had driven a mile out of their way to mail them from Dad’s box.

Dad left them right where they were for the carrier, and put the flag back up, and came back up the driveway laughing so hard he had to stop twice.

It kept going after that. Anybody on our road who had a letter to mail started bringing it by Dad’s. They would pull up and drop it in and put the flag up, and if Dad was out, they’d stop and talk.

People started waving at that post. I mean it. You’d come down that road and see it standing there, that old rusted axle with the dented gray box on top, and you’d lift your hand off the wheel at it. The bus kids started knocking on the bus windows when they went by.

Dad started walking down earlier so he would catch more of them. Some afternoons he did not get back up to the house until four.

The mail carrier told me in March she had never picked up so much outgoing mail from one box on her whole route.

In April, when the frost went out, Dad asked me to bring him a can of white paint and a small brush from the hardware store in town.

I did not ask what for. I figured he was touching up the porch railing.

The next time I came over, he was sitting on an overturned five-gallon bucket at the end of the driveway in the sun, with his cane laid across his knees and the paint can in the gravel beside him.

He was painting his name on the axle.

He did it slowly, letter by letter, in tall square capitals the way they taught it in his country school. E. Lindgren. His hand shook a little and he had to stop between letters and rest it on his knee.

I sat down in the gravel beside him and did not say anything.

“I painted my name on my first milk can just like this,” he said, not looking up. “Summer of 1956. Your mother and I had been married four months. I bought six cans from a man in Battle Lake who was selling out, and I painted E. Lindgren on every one, so the creamery would know they were mine.”

He finished the last letter and looked at it.

“I thought I was really something,” he said. “A married man with six cans of my own.”

Then he put the brush down across the top of the can, and he wiped his eyes with the back of his wrist, and he said it was the paint fumes.

I said I figured it was.