The Board Amos Never Owned Up To

The Red Side

On Monday morning, the twelfth of October, I sat across a checkerboard from my best friend’s widow while a man told her to go home, and I did not say one word, and the reason I did not is the thing she never knew.

I should say who I am. I am Amos Ruebush. I am seventy-four. I taught shop at Ellard High School for thirty-six years, and I have lived in the same two-story house on Elm Street since 1979, the last seven of them alone. You have heard from Vesta Rigby. She told it fair, and she did not make me out a fool, which I was not owed. But she can only tell you what she saw across a checkerboard. She did not see what I was holding under the table.

Let me start with the pieces. For three decades, Maynard Rigby sat in the ladder-back chair that faces the woodstove at the back of Ulrich Hardware, and I sat across from him, and every morning before he was in his chair I set out the red side on his edge of the board and the black on mine. It was not a courtesy. It was just where my hands went. When he died on the fourteenth of August I went on doing it, for fifty-nine mornings, with nobody in the chair. Alvin Tibbets said once, quietly, “Amos, you can quit setting his side.” I said, “I know.” I set it the next day.

So when Vesta came through the side door at two minutes past seven in her good wool coat, carrying Maynard’s other thermos in both hands like a woman carrying a casserole into a funeral, the red side was already out. Twelve pieces, in rows, waiting. I did not plan that.

She sat. The chair creaked the way it creaks for Maynard, a little rock to the left. Nobody said anything. I could hear the kettle on the stove.

Then Clell Sykes said it.

“Go home, Vesta. This is the one table where nobody has to watch what he says.”

I was looking at my hands. I want to tell you I looked up and spoke. I did not. I have been over that moment more than any checkers game I ever played, and the plain fact is that I let a man say a cruel thing to my best friend’s widow, because I was afraid that if I opened my mouth I would say something that would give me away.

That is the first thing Vesta did not know. It is not the only one.

She looked at the board. Her hands shook, once, and then she took a red piece off the back row and slid it forward. I moved. We played. I will say that I played that game straight. She was rusty, I was not thinking of anything but her hands, and I beat her in nine minutes without trying. When I took the last red piece, I felt sick to my stomach. She stood up, folded her hands in front of her coat, and said, “Thank you for the game, Amos.”

She walked out through the nail barrels. The side door closed. And I sat there with a captured red checker in my fist, and Alvin Tibbets, who is eighty-one and has never in my hearing criticized anybody, said, “Well, that was ugly.”