Thirty Years of Time Cards

The days before

Monday I made a list on the back of an envelope. Thirty boxes would be too heavy to carry, so I would take three: 1996 for the beginning, 1998 for the ice storm, and this year’s for the March card.

Alden called back that night to say that Brody Hewitt had put a county grader in the ditch at the Hallman crossing, and that a farmer had pulled him out with a tractor, and that nobody at the shop would say so out loud.

“Stan promised that boy the job,” Alden said. “Back in the summer. I heard it at the elevator. He told Brenda’s husband the seat would be his by Christmas.”

“Christmas,” I said.

“Randall’s pension date’s the eighth of January,” Alden said. “Stan couldn’t wait for that. Randall would’ve retired on his own and the seat would’ve opened clean. But Stan needed it sooner, to keep a promise he made at a family cookout.”

I looked at my envelope. Stan had not fired a man because of March 12. He had fired him because of a cookout, and a boy who was not ready, and a promise he could not take back in front of his own daughter.

I would like to say that made me hate him. It did not. It made me tired in a way I had not been before, because it was such a small, ordinary, human reason for such a large wrong.

But it was a wrong. Small reasons do not make wrongs smaller. They only make them easier to commit.

Tuesday morning

I made Randall breakfast on the day of the meeting, eggs and the good bacon, and he ate it without tasting it. When I came out of the bedroom in my gray sweater and navy wool coat, he looked at me for a long moment.

“I’ll drive you,” he said.

“You don’t have to.”

“I’ll drive you,” he said again, and he got the keys.

It was a cold clear November morning, the kind of day when the sky goes the blue of a good enamel pot and you can see all the way to the grain elevator eleven miles off. The cottonwoods along the creek had dropped everything but a few brown leaves.

I put the three boxes in the back seat, and Thelma’s walker in the bed of the truck. We picked her up at the apartments at 8:10, and she was waiting at the door in her wool coat with a purse the size of a feed sack.

At the courthouse Randall parked at the curb by the old limestone steps, and he did not turn off the engine. He sat there with both hands on the wheel.

“I can’t watch it, Janet,” he said.

“I know,” I said.

“I just can’t.” His voice cracked on the second word. “He’s my brother.”

“I know,” I said again, and I leaned across the seat and kissed him on the cheek, which I do not usually do in public.

Then I got out, and I took the boxes in two trips, and I walked Thelma down fourteen steps with her hand on my arm.