The Jar on the Feed Store Counter

The Slip in My Wife’s Hand

On the second Saturday of October I unfolded a slip of paper from the pickle jar on my feed store counter, and I knew the handwriting before I knew the word.

That should not have been possible. Better than five thousand slips have come out of that jar in fifteen years, and I had never once looked at one and felt my own heart do what it did that morning.

It was twenty past six. The store does not open until seven on Saturdays, and I come in at six so I can have the place to myself. I turn on the row of lights over the counter and none of the ones over the aisles. A dozen baby chicks I was holding for a customer slept in a pile under the heat lamp. The whole building smelled the way it has smelled since my father poured the floor in 1961, like cedar shavings and sweet feed and molasses, with a little diesel drifting over from the elevator across the street, where the wheat trucks were already lining up.

My coffee was in the green mug. The jar sits at the left end of the counter, a gallon pickle jar that came out of the church kitchen with a slot cut in the lid. I had counted what was in it before I ever sat down, the way a man counts the cattle in a pasture without meaning to. Seven slips. A heavy Saturday.

I read them out loud. That is the whole practice. I read each name into the empty store in my own voice, and after each one I stop and pray. Sometimes it is a sentence. Sometimes it is a breath and the word “Lord.” In fifteen years I have never asked a living soul what a name was for.

Number one was in pencil, in the careful slant of a child being watched over her shoulder. Number two was Wanda’s loops. Number three was Lemuel, who writes in ballpoint pressed so hard it comes through the back. Six was a hand I did not know, which happens, and I prayed it the same as the rest.

Number seven was folded in thirds, flat and crisp, like a church bulletin that has been ironed.

For eleven years, a slip folded exactly that way had turned up in the jar most Saturdays, printed in small square block letters that looked drawn with a ruler. Nobody’s hand. One word on it.

This one was not printed. It was written in cursive, in blue ink, and the first letter started with a hook and swung down and left in a long loop I had watched sign checks and Christmas cards and the back of a thousand school permission slips for forty-four years. I could have picked it out of a pile of ten thousand.

My wife, Elsa, had written a name and dropped it in my jar.

She had never written one. Not that I knew of.

I held it a long time. A wheat truck downshifted outside, and the screen door rattled in its frame. I opened my mouth to read it out loud, the way I had read every other slip for fifteen years, and nothing came out.