The Board Amos Never Owned Up To

The Rest of Monday

I drove out to Clell Sykes’s place that afternoon. I did not decide to. I found myself on his gravel lane with my truck in park.

He was on his porch with a paper he was not reading, a big man gone stooped. I stood by the steps and said, “That was a poor thing to say to her.”

“I know it.”

“I sat there and let you say it.”

“I know that too.” He folded the paper. “I am not sorry I said it, Amos. I am sorry I said it to her.”

I waited. A man does not rush Clell.

“It is the one place,” he said. “Terry has been gone five years the sixth of October. Every church supper, every time I walk in the bank, somebody tilts their head at me. That table is the one place in this county where nobody does. You and Alvin and Maynard talk about the price of beans and who cheated at pinochle in 1983, and I get to be a man who is just sitting there. And I saw her come in and I thought, here it comes. Somebody to be careful of. Somebody who will cry.” He pulled at his lip. “And it was Maynard’s chair, and I could not stand to see her in it.”

I said, “She is not going to tilt her head at you, Clell. She kept the books at the extension office thirty-four years. Every farmer in the county cried on her desk about his taxes, and I never heard her mention it to a soul.” I took off my cap. “She is coming back in the morning. I would like you to be there, and I would like you to look her in the face.”

He did not say he would. He looked at the field. I got in my truck.

For what it is worth, Terry was a student of mine in 1997, a thin boy with big hands who made a cedar birdhouse in my shop and gave it to his mother. Clell has it on the porch yet. The paint is gone, but it is level and square. I did not mention it. He knew what I was standing there for.