Saturday, I worked a half day. October’s when everybody suddenly remembers they have a propane tank.
I was driving home a little after noon in my own pickup when I saw somebody walking along the gravel shoulder of Otter Creek Road.
Very slowly. On the wrong side for traffic.
It was Mrs. Hartmann.
She had on a wool coat, and a clear plastic rain bonnet tied under her chin. Even though it wasn’t raining. She was planting her cane out ahead of her like a woman driving fence posts.
I pulled over and rolled down my window.
“Mrs. Hartmann. Where in the world are you going?”
“I am going to see Dale Thorson.”
“That’s another half mile.”
“I am aware of where he lives, Rebecca. I drove this road for forty years.”
“Who told you?”
“Donna Peterson drove me to town for my prescription on Thursday,” she said. “I can still read a bulletin board.”
She didn’t stop walking. I had to let my truck creep along beside her.
“You may drive me. Or you may follow me. I would prefer that you drive me. Because I would like to have some breath left when I get there.”
I got out and helped her up into the cab.
She weighed nothing. She smelled like wood smoke. I was glad of it.
“I don’t want you fighting my fights,” I said, after I had her seatbelt on.
“I am not fighting anything,” she said. “I am going to ask a former pupil a question.”
She set her cane upright between her knees and folded both hands on top of it.
“I had both of those boys at the same desk. Three years apart. Second row, by the radiator. I know them both a good deal better than you do. With respect.”
Dale was out in his yard when we pulled in. He had the hood up on somebody’s Ford.
He saw my truck and straightened up.
Then the passenger door opened.
And the cane came out.
And then one small black shoe.
I’ve watched my brother-in-law walk out on lake ice in March that nobody else in this county would stand on.
I watched him take one step backward from a woman who didn’t come up to his shirt pocket.
“Mrs. Hartmann,” he said.
And he took his cap off.
He was fifty-one years old. And he took his cap off.
“Dale.”
She walked right out into the middle of his yard.
She didn’t hurry. She didn’t look down at the ground. The shed door was standing open, and the red splitter sat just inside it.
She stopped where she could see it. Then she turned so she could see him.
“I have burned your brother’s wood for eleven winters,” she said. “I am burning it now. I had a fire this morning that his son laid for me. With oak that his widow paid you forty dollars for the privilege of splitting.”
She looked at him.
“I read that on a wall in town. In your own handwriting. Which has not improved.”
“Mrs. Hartmann—”
“I am not finished.”
She wasn’t loud. People say she never once raised her voice in thirty-four years of teaching. She didn’t raise it then.
“I have known you since you were nine years old,” she said. “You were not a greedy child. You were a proud one. You would take a zero on a test before you would ask to borrow a pencil. I sent a note home to your mother about it.”
Dale’s ears had gone red.
“So I do not believe you did this for forty dollars,” Mrs. Hartmann said. “I think there is something you could not make yourself ask for. And I would like you to tell this girl what it is. Right now. While I am standing here.”
She leaned on her cane.
“I am eighty-six. I cannot stand here long.”
Nobody moved.
A chickadee was calling in the pines behind the shed.
Dale looked at the splitter. He looked down at the cap in his hands.
Then he looked at me.
It was the first time he’d looked straight at me since April.
“He owed me six hundred dollars,” he said.
I didn’t understand him at first.
“Who did?”
“Jim. Back in February.”
It came out of him in pieces. Like something he had to pull out by hand.
“The rear end went out on his plow truck. He was laid up from hauling. The road bans were coming. You two were tight. I found an axle at the salvage yard in Antigo. Six hundred dollars. I put it on my credit card. And I put it in for him myself, over two nights. I didn’t charge him the labor. I wouldn’t have.”
“He never told me,” I said.
“He wouldn’t have. He said, ‘Don’t say anything to Beck. She’s got enough to worry about. I’ll square it with you when the roads open up and I’m hauling again.’”
Dale turned his cap around in his hands.
“The roads opened up on April twenty-second.”
Jim died on April ninth.
“And then I didn’t know how,” Dale said.
His voice was getting thick.
“I’m not good at it. I had the card bill coming every month. Every month I’d think, I’ll go up there and tell her. And then I’d think about walking into that kitchen. And asking a widow for six hundred dollars. At the table where he—”
He stopped.
“I couldn’t do it.”
He looked over at the splitter.
“I took the splitter that week because I thought, well, I’ll hold onto it. And when she asks for it, I’ll say it then. And then you asked. And I had it all ready to say. And what came out of my mouth was forty dollars an afternoon.”
“Fifteen afternoons,” Mrs. Hartmann said.
She’d always been quick at arithmetic.
“Yes ma’am.”
Dale’s eyes were wet.
“Fifteen afternoons, and we’d be square. And I’d never have to say it out loud. It sounded all right in the truck.”
He looked at me.
“It didn’t sound all right when you handed me the money. And then you asked for the receipt. I thought you were just being careful. I thought it was kind of funny.”
“I know you did,” I said.
“It’s not funny on that board.”
“No. It’s not.”
I stood there in his yard and felt a whole week of being right go out of me. Like air out of a tire.
Not all of it.
A man who’s owed six hundred dollars says so. He doesn’t take a dead man’s tools out of his widow’s yard and charge her by the day. I thought that then. I still think it now.
But I also thought about Jim, sitting at the kitchen table in February. Not telling me. To save me the worry.
And his brother down the road, not telling me. Because he was too ashamed to say it.
The two of them were exactly alike.
Second row. By the radiator.
“Wait here,” I said.
“Becky, I don’t—”
“Wait here, Dale.”
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