The Woman Who Kept My Grandfather’s Paper Alive

The Envelope

My grandfather, Lloyd Rask, died on a Tuesday in August, in his own bed in the house on Sumner Street where he had lived since 1961. He was ninety-one. He had owned the Oriel Beacon for fifty-eight years and his father had owned it before him, and for the last two months of his life he could not use his right hand, so he asked people to hold the pencil.

I had not seen him often. I want to be honest about that, because it matters later. My parents moved to Des Moines before I was born, and the Beacon was a Christmas thing for me: a smell of ink and warm paper in a back room, and a man in a brown cardigan who asked me about school. In 2024 he said to me on the phone, “You ought to come see the press run one Wednesday.” I said I would. I did not.

The funeral was Saturday, the twenty-ninth of August, at the Methodist church, and it was full. They stood along the back wall. After the lunch, in the kitchen on Sumner Street, my grandmother Gladys took me by the elbow. She is eighty-eight, small, and she has never once raised her voice in my hearing, which has always made me more afraid of her than of anyone.

She put an envelope in my hand. It was cream-colored, sealed, and it had my name on it in my grandfather’s wobbling left-hand writing, and under my name two words. After Ardith.

“What does that mean?” I asked.

“It means he wrote it in July,” Gladys said, “and he said you were to read it after you had talked to her, and not before.”

“Talked to her about what?”

“About whatever you decide,” she said. “He did not tell me what was in it. He told me you would tell her better without it.”

I put it in my coat. I did not open it, because of the two words on the front, and then the baby had an ear infection and there was a week, and then the week became a month. I carried it around in the same coat for thirty days.

I think I was afraid of what it said. I think I knew it would say something that made the sale harder, and I did not want it to be harder. I had a number in my head, and the number was $34,000.

What the Books Said

I should explain the number.

My grandmother and I went through the Beacon’s papers on the nineteenth of September, a Saturday, in the back office. Kristen, my wife, came up with the baby and sat on the floor of the front room with her on a blanket. Bailey was eight months old that week. She pulled herself up on the leg of the layout table and stood there, swaying, and looked at a framed front page from 1889 as if it were the most interesting thing she had ever seen.

I was supposed to be looking for the deed to the building and the printer’s contract. What I found was a checkbook register, in my grandfather’s hand, for a savings account at the Farmers Savings Bank that I had not known existed. It showed a transfer on the first of every month into the paper’s operating account. Nine years of them, every one for $1,900.

I am an adjuster. I add things up before I think about them. Nine years of $1,900 a month came to $205,200.

My grandfather had been paying that out of his own savings so the Beacon could come out on Thursdays. He had never told my grandmother until June, when the bank called after his stroke. He had never told Ardith. He had told the printer, Hartley Wiebe, and Hartley had kept his mouth shut for nine years, which in a town of two thousand is its own kind of miracle.