Thirty Years of Time Cards

The man who taught him

By Saturday morning I had a stack of cards that I wanted to talk to somebody about, and there was only one person who could tell me what I was looking at.

Alden Becker is eighty-two. He ran the grader for the county for thirty-six years before Randall did, and he is the one who sat Randall in the seat the first day and told him that a road is a living thing and you do not push it, you coax it.

Alden lives on the same farm below the same hill. I found him in the kitchen with his oxygen line looped over one ear and a plate of toast, and he knew why I was there before I got my coat off.

“Stan fired him,” Alden said.

“By text,” I said.

Alden put his toast down. He did not say anything for a while. Then he said a word I will not repeat, in front of me, to a school cook, in his own kitchen, and I let him because I felt the same way.

“What’s he going to do about it?” Alden asked.

“Nothing,” I said. “I’m going to the board a week from Tuesday. I want to read the time cards.”

Alden looked at me with his pale, watery eyes. “Read them out loud?”

“All thirty years if they give me the time.”

“They’ll give you three minutes,” he said. “Chet Brower runs a tight meeting.” Then he reached for the phone on the wall, which is the kind with a cord, and I watched him dial.

Thelma

On Sunday I drove to see Randall’s mother.

Thelma is eighty-four, and she lives in the apartments by the Methodist church.

But Randall had not told her either, and I could see on her face the moment I walked in that she had already heard. In a town of twelve hundred people, nothing is a secret past lunchtime.

“Stan called me,” she said. She was sitting at her little table with her hands wrapped around a mug she was not drinking from. “He said it was business. He said Randall had stopped showing up.”

“Randall had a heart attack,” I said. “In March. I drove him in myself.”

She closed her eyes. She is a small woman, and she seemed to get smaller while I watched.

“His father would be ashamed,” she said. “Of both of them. One for not saying anything and one for doing it.”

I did not argue. I took her mug and rinsed it, and I told her the board met on the first Tuesday of November and that I was going to speak.

“I’ll come,” she said.

“Thelma, the courthouse basement has fourteen steps and no rail on the left.”

“Then you’ll have to hold my arm,” she said, and that was all she would say about it.