Forty Alumni and One Blue Jacket

What the town did

I did not ask anyone to do anything about Shauna, and I want that understood too.

But the Saturday pie table at the sale barn cafe in Winner had been hers for six years, and by May somebody else was running it. No one told her why. People simply began to order their pie from the other woman.

The ladies at the Methodist church in Winner stopped saving her a seat at the funeral lunches. They were not unkind about it. They were only busy, every time, with someone else.

Alvin stayed on at his mother’s through April. Whatever he and Shauna said to each other, I never heard, and I never asked.

I took no pleasure in any of it. I also did not carry one pie to that table to change it.

Brookings

At state in Brookings, Josie placed fourth. The money in the bank envelope paid for the entry fee, the gas, and two nights in a motel by the interstate, where my father bought us all breakfast and told the clerk, twice, that his granddaughter was a speaker.

Everett was not among the alumni who came. His grandnephew drove up from Colome to tell me he had passed in his sleep in the first week of April, with the notebook paper on his nightstand.

Josie took the news standing in the kitchen. She did not cry. She went out to the mudroom and put on her jacket and walked to the pens, and I let her go.

She was gone an hour. When she came back, her eyes were red and she was calm.

“I gave it to him again,” she said. “Out there. The whole thing.”

I went to Everett’s funeral at the Methodist church in Colome. She wore the jacket. Sixty-one people sat in those pews, and nineteen of them wore blue corduroy, in every shade of faded and new.

What I think about

If the phone tree had failed, I would have sold a cow, and Josie would have had a perfectly good jacket. But what we got was forty people I mostly did not know, who dug into their billfolds for a girl they had never met, and an old man who spent his last spring giving a sixteen-year-old what he wished somebody had given him.

I think about those forty names on a sheet of notebook paper more than I think about the fire.

Josie has the new jacket on a wooden hanger in the mudroom now, and she wears it only for the things that count. The sandwich bag is still in the inside pocket. She says she will keep it there until the corduroy wears out.

I asked her once what she was keeping it for.

“It’s the proof,” she said. “That I had one before. And that somebody made me another.”

Last Saturday I went into the mudroom for my boots, and the jacket was hanging on its hook with the morning coming through the door and the gold on the chest catching it. The whole room smelled like the barn.

I stood there a minute with one boot on, breathing it in.