Thirty Years of Time Cards

Item four

The board room is a basement with a low ceiling and green tile and a long oak table that came out of the old courthouse in 1938. It smelled of floor wax and radiator heat.

Three commissioners sat behind the table in leather chairs. At the end sat Stan, in his county jacket with the road department patch on the sleeve, with a folder in front of him.

He did not look up when I came in. He did not look up when I signed the sheet. He was studying that folder like it was a hymn he was going to be asked to sing.

There were about thirty people in the folding chairs, which was more than usual, I was told later. A few were farmers waiting on a culvert item.

I did not see any of them look at me. I put my three boxes on the floor beside the microphone and sat down next to Thelma.

Chairman Brower banged a small gavel and moved through the minutes. A culvert. A bid on salt. The budget for a new roof on the fairgrounds barn.

“Item four,” he said at last. “Personnel matter, public comment. Mrs. Janet Hargis. You have three minutes, ma’am.”

My knees did not feel like mine when I stood. I walked to the microphone and held the stand with both hands, the way I would hold a rail on ice.

“My name is Janet Hargis,” I said, and my voice came out thin, so I said it again lower. “I cook lunch at Cedar Fork Elementary. My husband is Randall Hargis. He drove the grader for this county for twenty-nine years and nine months.”

Stan lifted his head.

“On October 23,” I said, “he was fired by a text message at 6:12 in the morning. It said unexcused absence on March 12. It said effective today. I brought his time cards.”

The cards

I lifted the lid off the first box. It said 1996 on the side in my own marker, and the rubber band had gone brittle, so I slid it off carefully and it broke in my hand.

“January 8, 1996,” I read. “Eight hours. Gravel on County Road 14. Signed D. Hargis.”

I had not expected that part. But on the first card, in the corner where the supervisor initials, there it was in blue ballpoint. Stan had signed Randall’s first day of work.

Brower leaned forward. “Mrs. Hargis, we have the personnel file.”

“Yes, sir,” I said. “I’d like to read what the file left out.”

I took out the next card, and the next, and I read them. January 9. January 10. A culvert on the Fenner road, a wash on 22, a snow route that ran eleven hours.

I read the hours and the roads and the little notes in my husband’s square printing.

I read for the whole three minutes, and I did not look up once. I could hear the radiator ticking and a chair creak somewhere in the back, and then nothing but my own voice, flat and steady, saying dates.

“That’s time, Mrs. Hargis,” Brower said.

“I know,” I said. “I’d like one more minute.”

He looked down the table at the other two commissioners. Marcia Albers, a retired teacher with reading glasses on a chain, gave the smallest nod. Bill Pettit shrugged.

“One minute,” Brower said.

I did not take it for the old cards. I put my hand in the box marked with this year and took out the one I had put on top that morning. I had checked it eleven times in the car.

“March 12,” I said. “This is the card for the week he had his heart attack.”