Thirty Years of Time Cards

The initials

It was a plain county time card, the same as the others. Monday, eight hours. Tuesday, eight hours. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday, a dash in Randall’s printing and the word sick.

And in the corner, in blue ballpoint, two letters and a date.

“Approved sick leave, March 14,” I read. “Initialed by D. Hargis.”

I turned it around so the commissioners could see, and I held it up high enough that the people in the back could see too.

“Stan signed it himself,” I said. “Two days after the heart attack. He signed it and he put it in the file, and for seven months nobody had a thing to say about March 12. Not him, not the county. Not until a promotion needed a seat.”

Nobody in that basement made a sound. A man in the second row had turned all the way around in his chair to look at the road commissioner.

Stan had gone gray. He had one hand on his folder and the other at his throat, and he did not look like a man who had ever sat in that chair with any power.

Brower cleared his throat. “Stan, is that your initial on that card?”

Stan opened his mouth. He did not seem to be able to say anything.

That was when I heard it behind me, the stairwell door and then a cane on concrete, slow, tap and step, tap and step. I did not turn around. I knew that cane. I had seen it at Alden Becker’s back door.

The four

Alden came down the center aisle in a clean pressed shirt and a tie that was probably from 1985. Behind him came three more men, each in his good coat with his cap in his hands.

I knew them. Marvin Meyer, who ran the grader on the north end for twenty-six years and had a hip made of titanium. Vern Axtell, who could tell you the grade of any gravel road in the county by the sound of a pickup on it.

And Merrill Kimbrell, eighty-eight, who had come in on his daughter’s arm.

Four retired grader operators. Between them they had given the county well over a hundred years of road.

Alden stopped beside me and put his hand on the back of a folding chair, because his breath was short. He looked at the commissioners.

“Chet,” he said. “Mind if we say a word?”

“It’s public comment, Alden,” Brower said, and I saw his face change. “Say what you came to say.”

“I gave this county thirty-six years,” Alden said. “That pension was my idea, back in eighty-nine. I stood in this room and I told the board a road man should not have to retire on hope.”

He took a breath, and the oxygen line hissed.

“That boy Randall,” he said. “I put him in that seat myself. Anybody on this board who ever drove to town in January on a clear road, ask yourself who made it clear.”

Marvin stood up next. “Twenty-six years,” he said. “Randall covered my route when my wife had cancer. Never wrote it on a card. I’m telling you now.”

Vern stood. “He got my truck out of a creek in 2009 with that grader and never charged the county an hour.”

Then Merrill Kimbrell, eighty-eight, with his hand on his daughter’s arm. He did not say much.

“I trained the man who trained the man who trained him,” he said, in a voice like paper. “A man with nine months to go does not get fired by a text. That is not how we did things.”