What It Cost
“I have one more thing to say,” I told them, “and then I will let you eat your pie.”
I took the envelope out of my coat pocket. It was a check, and I had written it that morning at the kitchen table, and it was the largest check I have ever written for anything that was not a mortgage.
“Verna, this is thirty-one hundred dollars. It is to buy forty life jackets, Coast Guard approved, adult and child sizes, for a rack at the public launch. Anyone can take one. Anyone can bring one back. No names, no sign-out sheet. I want them hanging by that dock before the ice goes out in the spring.”
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Verna took the envelope. She read the amount. She looked at me over her glasses.
“Doss, that’s the roof money.”
“The roof will hold another winter,” I said. “I’ve been told it will. I have a bucket.”
Somebody in the back laughed, a small gentle laugh, the kind that lets a room breathe. Then another. Then Pastor Dahl said, “Amen,” not loudly, and somebody else said it after him.
“I would like them named for two men,” I said. “Hank and Pete Lindgren, of Flint, Michigan. Thirty-one and thirty-four. They went out on a boat in November of 1983, and they did not come home. Nobody ever put their names anywhere in this county. I would like it to be here.”
I sat down. My legs had gone, and I sat very hard.
Nobody said anything for a time. Then a chair scraped, and Lowell Kregel stood up, with his cane. He crossed the room one step at a time, with every person in the hall watching, and stopped beside my chair.
He did not say anything. He put his hand on my shoulder. It was a big, spotted, shaking hand, and it stayed there until the pastor got up to say the closing prayer.
“I’ll put in twelve hundred beside it,” Lowell said, when the room had started to move again. His voice was very low. “Put it under their names.”
“You don’t have to.”
“I know I don’t.” He leaned on the cane. “I’ve waited forty years to have something to do.”
Mr. Hasselquist found me by the coffee urn. He had been crying, and had not bothered to hide it.
“I don’t know what that card said, Doss,” he said. “But I think the boy would be proud to hear that speech.”
“He may never hear it.”
“Then he will hear that his father stood up in front of a hundred and forty people and said it first.” The old man put his hand on my arm. “That is what I will tell him. If he asks me.”