The Camp I Sold Behind His Back

After the funeral the chapel gave us the guest book. It was a green cloth book about the size of a family Bible, with a gold cord on the spine and a pocket in the back cover where the funeral home puts the family’s papers. My mother took it home. She kept it on a shelf for nineteen years and never opened it. In the spring of 2022 she married a good man named Ron Heitz and moved to Joplin, and when she cleared the house she handed me a cardboard box and said it was Dad’s things. It had his wristwatch bands, his union card, a pocketknife, and the green book. I did not open it. I could not make myself read the names. I put the box in the loft over my shop, behind the roof flashing and the extra ladders, and it sat there four years and three months.

On Saturday the thirty-first of October, a Saturday, the day before the clocks went back, I went up to that loft because Mr. Dunphy wanted a full list of my equipment for the payment plan, and the list had to include everything in the shop. I was hauling boxes down. I had the green book in my hands before I knew I was holding it, and I was standing under a bare bulb, and I opened it, because that was the last box and it seemed I had run out of reasons not to.

There were two hundred and twelve names. My grandfather’s, in a hand gone shaky even then. Hap Lundy’s. Arvel Goss’s. Every man in the old camp, and the two men who ran the road grader crew with my uncle, and a school board member, and a woman who had cut my father’s hair for twenty years. My uncle’s name was on the third page, in blue ballpoint, small and square, Dwain and Leota Penrod, and next to it, in the space for remarks, he had written: Orley, you were the better fisherman. I stood there and read that line more than once.

Then I turned to the back, because the pocket was stuffed, and I pulled out what was in it.

There was a funeral program. There was a thank-you card from the church. And folded in thirds, behind them, there was a yellow statement on the letterhead of Raymer Funeral Chapel, itemized down the page. The casket, the vault, the opening and closing of the grave, the chapel, the flowers, the hearse. Total, five thousand nine hundred dollars. At the bottom, in a rubber-stamped box: PAID IN FULL. Under that a date, Thursday, November sixth, 2003, the day before my father’s funeral. And under that a signature in the same small square blue ballpoint as the guest book.

Dwain Penrod.

Pinned to the corner with a paper clip was a half-sheet of the chapel’s notepaper, in his slanting pen. It said: Dwain asked me to throw this away and tell the family it was the boot drive. I could not do it. It is the only one I ever kept. C. Raymer.