The Lane I Plowed First

Marcene and the pie plate

It cost us more than a wave.

Lorraine Tollefson got sick in the third year of it. Marcene learned it from somebody’s cousin at the grocery, which tells you how far down we had gone.

She came home white and said she wanted to take a hotdish over and sit with her. And I said no.

I said it quietly, the way you say the worst things. “We are not going over there, Marcene.”

My wife is a gentle woman. She worked thirty-four years as a care aide, the last twelve at the Prairie View Care Center in Kerrick, and she sits with the dying because somebody should.

She looked at me a long while and did not argue. She said, “That’s your pride talking, Burdette, and Lorraine isn’t going to be here long enough to wait for it.”

Then she set a pie plate of Lorraine’s, left in our cupboard since the rhubarb summer before the fence, on the shelf by the door, and it stayed there.

Lorraine died on the ninth of November, seven years ago. Two hundred people came to Our Savior’s. I went, and I sat in the back and left before the hotdish.

I stood at the back in my brown suit and saw Elwin in the front pew with his big shoulders gone small, and his daughter Joanne holding him up by the elbow, and beside her a little boy in a clip-on tie, her son Emmitt, who was eight.

I left before the lunch. I did not go to the cemetery. I sat in my truck in the church lot with the heater running and watched the cars pull out for the graveside, and I told myself it was respect, that a man who had been shut out ought to know when not to push in.

Marcene went to the graveside in her good black coat and stood beside her friend’s casket. When she got home she hung the coat up and said nothing to me for two days. I earned every hour.