What The Movers Found In The Mattress

What the movers found sewn inside my mother’s mattress rewrote everything I thought I knew about her

The mattress was the last thing left in the house.

We had been three weeks clearing out my parents’ farmhouse by then, me and my brother Dale and my sister Joann, and we had carried out everything else a body accumulates in fifty years of marrying and farming and raising children on a county road outside Templeton, Iowa. The deep freeze with the venison still in it. The davenport with the burn mark where Dad set his pipe down once in 1988 and never heard the end of it. The good dishes nobody ever ate off of. The bad dishes everybody ate off of every single day. We had emptied the corncrib and the milk house and the drawer in the kitchen where Mom kept the twist ties and the church bulletins and a single leather glove that had no mate and no explanation.

But the bed we left for last, because the bed felt like the two of them.

They had slept on that same mattress for thirty-one years. I knew the number because I was the one who kept the numbers in our family, the birthdays and the anniversaries and the dates of the funerals, and I remembered the winter they bought it. It was the year the hogs finally paid for something other than the loan. Dad drove the half-ton into Carroll and came back with a mattress strapped down in the box under a tarp, grinning like he had stolen it, and Mom stood in the yard with her hands on her hips and said he was a foolish man for spending money on something you did nothing but lie down on. Then she helped him wrestle it up the narrow stairs and she never slept anywhere else again. Neither did he.

Dad went first, four years ago, in February, the way the old farmers tend to go, quiet in the early dark with the chores still waiting. Mom stayed on in the house another three years, stubborn as a fence post, sleeping on her side of that bed with his side made up smooth every morning like he might come back and need it. When she went this past August it was in her sleep, on that mattress, and I have made a kind of peace with the fact that the last thing her body knew was the shape of the place where he used to be.

So you understand why none of us wanted to be the one to haul it to the curb.