The Bell I Almost Took Down

Marcella

My wife Marcella died on the twenty-second of October, 2019, in the front bedroom of our house, after a cancer that took nineteen months from the first visit to the end. She was sixty-six. I will not say much about it. She was a better person than I will be at my best, and she did not like to be made a fuss of.

Three days before she died she asked me to sit on the edge of the bed. She said, “Loyal, I am going to say this once. Don’t you sit in this house with my ghost.”

I said I wouldn’t.

She said, “You will. You are a man who stays where he’s put.” She was right about that, too. “Go to that fence. Go out to Duane. Go on living where somebody can find you.”

For four years I did what she told me, and I went to the post every afternoon at four thirty, and Duane was there, and I was found. Marcella was right about that as well. She generally was.

Then Duane got sick.

She never asked me for anything. I want that understood. She never once in eighteen months asked me for a hand with her husband. She was a woman who did the thing in front of her. I carried in firewood and she said thank you. I fixed the washer and she said thank you. I stood at the post by myself at four thirty some afternoons, with the folding chair that nobody sat on, and looked toward the house, and a lamp was always burning in the front room.

Duane Stroud died on Thursday the eighth of February, 2024, at about eleven in the morning. I was in the room. I held the door.