The Watch I Kept for Thirty Years

The Watch

Now I have to tell you the thing I could not look at my wife about when she paid for the bathrooms, and for six years of Sundays.

On Tuesday, the eighteenth of June, 1996, a hailstorm came across Hesper at about four in the afternoon, a green wall out of the southwest, and in eleven minutes it took every head of wheat on the hundred and sixty acres I was renting that year. I was forty-four years old. Wilda was in the Ludlow hospital that week with her gallbladder, and Kenna was fourteen and Boyd was seventeen and Garrett was twenty-two and in Lincoln. I had a note at the Ludlow State Bank for $1,650, due on Monday, the twenty-ninth of July, and nothing coming in but a county paycheck, which was already spoken for.

I went to the bank and was told, gently, that they would have to call it. I told no one. I went home and sat in the shed for an hour.

On Monday, the twenty-second of July, Pastor Ostby, who was young then and had been at Hesper Methodist two years, came out to the road department yard and asked if he could speak to me. He had a sealed envelope in his hand. He said it was from “a friend of this family who wishes to remain a friend.” There was $1,650 in it, in ones and fives and a few tens, soft as flannel. He said I could take it to the bank and that no one would ever ask me who.

I took it to the bank. I paid the note. I spent five days thinking it was the Methodist Men or the church’s benevolence fund, and I meant to thank them all.

On Saturday morning, the twenty-seventh of July, I was at the counter of the Dilworth Cafe having coffee, and Mr. Kessling, who owns the jewelry store in Ludlow and drives to Hesper on Saturdays because his wife is from here, sat down next to me. He is a talker. He told me, the way a man tells you the weather, that the bus driver, Mrs. Crowell, Leo Crowell’s wife, had come into his shop the Friday before and sold him a woman’s gold Hamilton, a small one, a fine old thing with a cracked crystal. She had asked him what he would give her. He said four hundred and fifty dollars. She said, “That will do,” and did not haggle, and left without looking at it again, and he had thought it strange because she had been holding it so carefully when she came in.

He said, “And then I heard from my sister-in-law at the bank that Ostby came in Monday with an envelope for the Amberg note, and the bills were all soft. Soft ones and fives, and some of them still had the bus company’s rubber band on them. I thought, now where have I heard about a woman with soft ones and fives?”

I put down my coffee.