Thirty Years of Time Cards

Friday at noon

I had not planned to watch the grader go by. But on Friday a little before noon I was on the porch folding the wash when I heard the diesel down the section line, and I knew the sound of that engine better than I know the sound of my own doorbell.

It came over the hill with its blade angled, throwing up a long clean curl of gravel on our road. Our road. The road Randall had graded every second week of his working life, the one he took pride in because he said you could drive it with a full glass of tea and not spill a drop.

Brody Hewitt was in the seat. He is Stan’s son-in-law, married to Stan’s daughter Brenda, and until that week he had driven a fertilizer truck for the co-op.

He lifted two fingers off the wheel and waved at me. Like we were friends. Like the road had been waiting for him.

That was the moment I stopped being scared and started being organized. It is a different feeling, and a better one.

The boot boxes

I keep everything. My mother was the same, and her mother lived through the Dust Bowl, so you can blame the whole line of us.

Every two weeks since January 1996, Randall has handed me his pay stub and, folded inside it, the county time card with his hours in his square carpenter’s printing. I put them in a boot box, one box a year, with a rubber band around the cards and the year written on the lid in marker.

Thirty boxes. I carried them out of the hall closet and set them on the dining table that Friday night, and Randall came to the doorway and stood there with his arms crossed.

“What are you going to do with those?” he asked.

“Read them,” I said. “Every one.”

I started in 1996. And somewhere around the third box, which was 1998, I forgot I was building a case and just started to remember.

There was a time card from December 24, 1998. It said he had worked thirty-one hours straight, because the ice storm had put the county in the dark and every road in it under glass.

Next to the hours, in his printing, he had written Plowed to the Becker place for insulin.

I remembered that night. I had driven out at two in the morning with a thermos of soup and Beth, who was five, asleep against my arm in the pickup. The grader had been stopped at the bottom of the Becker hill with its lights going, and Randall had climbed down so stiff from the cold that I had to unscrew the thermos lid for him.

Beth woke up and held out a candy cane she had been saving. He took it with a hand that would not close, and he said it was the best thing he had eaten all year.

I sat at that table and I cried over a time card. It was not a good cry, the kind that helps. It was the kind you get when you realize how much of a man’s life is sitting in a shoebox, and how easy it is for someone to say it did not count.

Randall had come up behind me without a sound. He put one hand on my shoulder and did not say anything, and we both looked at the card for a long time.

“I forgot about the candy cane,” he said finally.

“I didn’t,” I said.

He went to bed. I stayed up and kept reading, and I did not stop until the kitchen clock said four.