The Board Amos Never Owned Up To

The Thursday

He played through July. He was thinner every week, and the seed cap sat lower, and some mornings Alvin or I helped him from the truck to the chair without making a thing of it. He still beat me, loud and satisfied. On Friday, the thirty-first of July, he made his last mark on the underside of the board, a crooked slash, and I did not know it was his last.

On Thursday, the thirtieth, the day before that, he asked me to come to the house in the afternoon. Vesta had driven to Waterloo with a binder of his records for a second appointment, and he was alone in the front room in a recliner with an afghan on his knees, and he said, “Sit down, Amos. I have a thing to ask, and I don’t want her here for it.”

He did not make a speech. He is not a man to. He said, “When I am gone, I want you to put her in my chair.”

I said, “Maynard.”

“She will not come on her own. She will think it is mine and she will leave it empty, and she will sit in that kitchen at seven in the morning for a year, and I know her. But if somebody pulls the chair out, she will come.” He looked at the ceiling. “She is stubborn about being left alone. It will take her a month to decide to be mad enough.”

I said I would pull out the chair.

“And do not let her win,” he said.

I did not understand. He said it again, slower. “Do not let her win, Amos. She will know. She has always known. She knew when I let our daughter win at Parcheesi, and she knows when somebody is being gentle with her, and the minute she knows she will quit. You play her straight. That is the kindest thing you can do. Play her like me.”

I said that I would.

Then he looked at me, and I have never forgotten it. He said, “I have known about you since 1998.”

I have never been so frightened as I was in that front room. I said, “Maynard, I never.”

“I know you never. I watched you never for twenty-eight years.” He was smiling a little. “It never cost me one night’s sleep. It is half the reason I can stand to go. A man who could keep that quiet that long is a man I can leave her with.” He closed his eyes. “I am not asking for anything but the chair, Amos. And the games. Do the rest on your own time, if she wants it, and if she does not, you play checkers with her. That will be plenty.”

He gave me the pencil that afternoon, a stub of a carpenter’s pencil sharpened down to nothing, chewed at the end. “For the tally,” he said. “Somebody has to keep it honest.”

I carried that pencil in my shirt pocket for eleven weeks and never wrote with it.

Fifty-Nine Mornings

The funeral was Tuesday, the eighteenth of August. Vesta wore navy. Lunch was at the Legion hall, and I stood at the back holding a plate, because I had made Maynard a promise and had no idea how to start keeping it.

I will tell you what I would not tell anyone in town. Maynard told me to pull out the chair, and for fifty-nine days I could not do it. An empty chair was the last thing of his I had. So I came at five till seven, set out the pieces, played the first game against nobody, and told myself, tomorrow. Glenda dusted the chair on Fridays. We all waited for somebody else to say it was time.

And then she walked in on her own, in her good coat, and sat down. She did not need me to pull out any chair. That was a good deal braver than anything I had done.