The Woman Who Kept My Grandfather’s Paper Alive

Sumner Street

That evening I sat at my grandmother’s kitchen table with the envelope in front of me, and she put a cup of coffee beside it and went into the other room, and I opened it.

I have the letter in front of me as I write this. He wrote it with his left hand, in pencil, over a week in July. The letters lean. It is two pages. I am going to give you the part she told me to give you.

Brett,

If you are reading this then you have told Ardith, and I hope you were gentle. I hope also that you were not too gentle, because she has been told the truth by me for forty-one years and would take it as an insult if you did anything else.

I did not tell your grandmother or Ardith that the paper has lost money for nine years. I paid for it out of what your grandmother and I put by. I thought it was my business to carry. I now believe it was pride, and you will find the sum of it in the savings book. I am sorry for it. Your grandmother has been kinder about it than I deserved.

I want to tell you the thing I did wrong, so you do not do it. I never once let the town pay for its own paper. I kept the price at $38 for twenty years because I was ashamed to raise it, and I covered the rest. The result is that nobody in Oriel knows what the Beacon costs, because I would not let them find out. A town cannot value what it has never been asked to pay for.

Ardith will tell you she wants to keep it. She will be right to want it. But she must not do it with her own money, and you must not let her. Mine is gone, and I will not have hers go after. If she is going to try, let her put it to the town. Let the town show her what it will bear. If it will not bear it, then the Beacon was already dead, and I was too stubborn to hold the funeral. If it will, then the name is worth more than any chain’s check, and you will know it.

Sell it to anyone who will spell the names right. If Ardith wants it, let her have it for what it is worth to you, which I hope you will find is a dollar.

Your grandfather.

P.S. In the bottom drawer of the filing cabinet there is a shoebox. Give it to her after she has the name. Not before.

I read it twice at the table. Then I put my head down on my arms, and I felt my grandmother come in and put her hand on my back.

“He knew,” I said. “He knew what I would do. He knew what I would say to her.”

“He knew you would do it badly,” Gladys said. “He was counting on you to do it kindly, in the end, and so far you are one for two.”

I laughed. It came out as something else.

I said, “I already gave her the terms. Eleven hundred paid subscribers. The money held in the paper’s name, returned if she is short. Gran, that is nearly what he is asking.”

“Is it?”

“I made it up at the counter. I did not have the letter.”

“No,” she said. “You made it up because you did not want her to lose what she had. And you did not want to say so. He was the same.”