The Red Scarf I Kept in Cedar

I said I thought he would.

“He’s a good boy, Stan.”

“I’d say he’s a good man.”

“He said I was curling my hair for a boy from 1971.” She laughed, but it was the other kind. “Isn’t that something? Like I’d gone back to the age I was. Like I was done being anything else.”

I put down my cup.

And this is where, if you’re asking, the decision was made.

I thought about that sentence all the way home. A boy from 1971. That is what her son sees when he looks at me: a ghost out of a yearbook, come back to take his mother off somewhere. He does not know the boy from 1971 would be dead in a hole in the ice if his mother had stayed home. He does not know she once lay down flat on a rotten pond with a fence rail and her grandmother’s scarf and skinned both her hands and hauled a boy out of the grave.

Nobody in Elmcrest knew. That was the sin of it, if there was one. She had been a hero for fifty-six years in secret, and the town called her a widow and a clinic girl and a good church woman, and never the thing she was.

I had told myself I was keeping her secret out of respect, and in January of 1970 that was true. But Joleen had told me not to wait until I was too old to climb the steps, and I had spent two weeks hunting for a right moment that was never going to come.

The Second of November

I woke Monday at five, in the dark, because the clocks had been set back the day before and my body had not caught up. I drove out to the cemetery south of town and stood at Joleen’s stone in the cold with my cap off. “It’s your birthday. I’m going today. I have owed that girl a thank-you since I was sixteen years old, and I did not mean to run out of Mondays before I paid it.”

I went home and opened the cedar chest. It smelled of my mother’s house, a clean red smell, like pencil shavings. The scarf lay in its tissue where it had lain since 1998, the rope cable running down the middle as even as a braid. I held it against my face a minute and will not say what I thought. Then I wrapped it in fresh tissue and carried it out to the truck like something that could be spilled.

The Hartzell house is a white bungalow with a green door and eight steps up to a porch with a swing. I had counted them from the street.