The Tapes That Came Back To Me

The shelf nobody was filling

I want to start with a shelf, because that is where all of it started.

The Bethany public library sits on the square in Harrison County, Missouri, a brick building with a furnace that bangs in the winter and a reading room that smells like paste and old paper.

Down a short hall past the card catalog there used to be a metal shelf, and on that shelf sat a row of gray cassette machines and a cardboard box of blank tapes.

They were meant for the blind. The state sent them out years back, part of a program to record the local news for folks who could not read it for themselves.

The trouble was simple. Nobody in our county had the time to sit and fill them.

The machines gathered dust. The box of blank tapes stayed sealed in its plastic. A good idea sitting on a shelf is just a shelf.

I noticed it the winter my husband Harold retired from the co-op, the winter I was fifty-one and suddenly had Tuesdays and Fridays with nothing in them.

Edna, the librarian back then, caught me looking at that shelf one afternoon. She said the state would pay for the postage but there was no one to do the reading.

I told her I could read. I had a clear voice and all my teeth, I said, and she laughed at that.

She set me up in the back room that same day. She showed me how to press record and how to tell when a tape was near its end by the little window on the side.

I was slow at it the first month. I cleared my throat too much. I turned pages too loud and the microphone caught every crinkle of it.

But I kept at it, Tuesday and Friday, the way you keep at anything worth doing.

Harold did not understand it at first. He asked me who exactly was listening.

I did not have a list of names to give him. I only knew there were people in our county living in the dark, and the paper came to everybody else’s porch.

That seemed wrong to me. A birth, a death, the price of beans at the elevator, the ballgame on Friday night. That is a county talking to itself.

If you cannot read it, you are cut out of the conversation of your own hometown.

So I decided I would be the voice that read the county out loud. I did not know it would take nineteen years of my life. I only knew it needed doing, and I had the Tuesdays to do it.