Forty Alumni and One Blue Jacket

Overnight

Marge called a supply dealer in Sioux Falls that Monday afternoon and found a jacket in Josie’s size on the shelf. She paid for overnight freight on her own card, before a single dollar had come in. She said she would square it with the envelope later.

She asked me for Josie’s measurements, and I gave them to her from memory, because a mother knows.

I thought that would have to do. But Marge was not done.

“The name needs stitching,” she said. “Rita at the saddle shop on Main does embroidery. She’ll do it overnight if I ask her.”

“Overnight? Marge, it’s a week of work.”

“It’s an hour of work, and Rita owes me for the Christmas wreaths.” She handed me a slip of paper. “Don’t argue with me, Phoebe. I’m seventy-one years old. I do what I want.”

I won’t pretend I did not argue. I argued for about as long as it takes to say it.

The jacket came Wednesday morning on the delivery truck, and Marge walked it down the street to Rita herself, in her charcoal fleece vest, in the cold. Rita stitched the name that afternoon and would not take a penny for it.

She said she had been Josie’s age once, and somebody had done something for her.

Marge drove it out to the farm at suppertime. She did not make a speech. She set the bag on the kitchen table and said, “Don’t thank me. Wear it.”

Josie put one arm in, then the other. It fit. Of course it did. She pulled the zipper up to her chin and stood very still in the middle of the kitchen.

Then she did a thing I will carry to my grave.

She took the sandwich bag out of her pocket. She slipped the scorched little pull-tab out of it, and she held it up beside the new zipper, against the gold, as if she were introducing them.

Then she put it back in the bag and zipped the bag into the inside pocket of the new jacket, over her heart.

“Okay,” she said. Her voice was steadier than mine. “Now I can give it.”

Marge blew her nose into a paper napkin she had produced from somewhere.

“That’s not all of it,” she said at the door. “Be home tomorrow afternoon. Both of you.”

The white pickup

Thursday afternoon was bright and cold, the ruts still frozen in the shade. I was in the yard in my tan canvas chore coat, checking the steers in the back pens, and Josie came straight off the school bus and out to help me.

She had the new jacket on over the white blouse and scarf she had worn to speech practice, her long blonde hair loose over the collar.

“You’ll get it dirty,” I said.

“It’s supposed to smell like the barn, Mom,” she said. “That’s the whole point of it.”

I had no answer to that. I still do not.

“There’s a truck,” Josie said a minute later.

A white pickup came up the lane with a long plume of dust behind it. I knew it was Marge’s before it got close, because she drives that truck the way she does everything else, with the full authority of a woman who has outlived three bosses.

She parked by the barn and got out in her charcoal fleece vest. Bob Tieszen came around the other side, a rancher from Gregory County, seventy-three, in his good tan straw cowboy hat.

Marge was carrying a flat brown cardboard box in both hands.

She crossed the yard slowly, boots crunching on the frozen ruts. She held it out in front of her the way you carry something you have been told not to drop.

Josie stopped at the gate and wiped her boots on the bottom rail. I do not know why she did that. I think she felt it was the thing to do before something important.

“Miss Josie,” Bob said.

“Yes, sir.”

“Forty people signed this,” he said. “Open it slow.”

Marge held the box out to her, and Josie put both hands on it, and her eyes moved over my face.

I nodded. And then Josie lifted the lid.