Who owns a strong back
I did not go to the church to make a scene. I would like that to be clear, because it matters to me how it happened.
Monday evening I pulled into the gravel lot at Dunmore Methodist, where the older men were unloading folding chairs for the Wednesday supper, and I waited until they had finished and started drifting toward their trucks.
I didn’t stand up in front of anyone. I walked up to Gus Lund, who is seventy-four, a retired rural mail carrier, and has been a deacon since before I was born. He taught me to ride a bike in that lot.
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“Gus. I need to ask a favor, and it’s a physical one.”
“Is your grandmother all right?”
“She’s fine. She’ll be home Saturday.” I took a breath. “Her piano got sold at a yard sale. I found it. It’s twenty-two miles from here, in a welding shop. I need to get it onto her porch and into her front room before she walks in, and I need it done Friday.”
He looked at me for a while with his mail carrier’s eyes, the kind that have looked at ten thousand mailboxes and have learned to read the story in how they lean.
“Who sold it?”
“It doesn’t matter.”
“It matters to some.”
“It’s family, Gus.” I kept my voice level. “She meant to help. She got it wrong. I’m not asking you to carry that. I’m asking you to carry the piano.”
He didn’t say anything for a few seconds. Then he turned and called across the lot in the voice he used for the church picnic, a voice that could stop a tractor.
“Grant! Orin! Otis, you got a minute? Floyd, bring your gloves.”
By the time I looked at my watch, there were five men standing around me. Grant Brecht, who runs the feed store. Orin Berg, a farmer who put in forty years behind a combine. Otis Ostrom, a county road crew foreman. Larry Smith, a plumber whose back had been bad for ten years. And Floyd Pohl, seventy-one, who leaned on a cane.
Floyd said, “I can do three steps if they’re slow steps.”
“You don’t have to,” I said.
“Ramona Krueger sat with my wife when she was dying,” Floyd said. “Two nights. Never asked for a thing. I’ll do three steps.”
“Walt will have the trailer at Grandma’s by two.”