Ruthie found him first, and she was seven.
“Nana, that man’s been standing by the coats a long time,” she said.
Sixty-eight years I was married to Emmett, and I had NEVER seen that man.
He was older than my husband. Bent at the top of his back, in a service jacket gone the colour of weak tea.
He had been looking at Emmett’s photograph by the casket since the prayer ended.
Nobody had come to me all afternoon except with casseroles.
I let Ruthie pull me across the hall by two fingers.
Up close he smelled like cough drops and rain.
“Otis,” he said. “Your husband and I were in the same company.”
Emmett never gave me a name in sixty-eight years. Not one.
Not ONE name.
He reached inside the jacket and took out a flat olive tin with a rubber band around it, and the band had gone hard and cracked a long time ago.
“He told me if he went first, this was to reach you, Lorraine,” Otis said. “Nobody else. He was clear about that part.”
The tin had been carried. You could see it. The paint was worn white at the corners where a thumb goes.
I asked how long he had been keeping it.
“Since 1961.”
Sixty-five years in a stranger’s pocket, while I made that man his breakfast.
My hands are ninety years old and they do what they want now.
The band broke when I touched it.
Ruthie leaned in on the arm of the chair.
I got the lid up about half an inch.
Then all the way.
And the sound that came out of me turned every head in that room.
“WHAT IS THIS. WHAT IS THIS, OTIS.”
He would not look at me. He looked at the floor tiles and said the only thing he had left to say.
“He never wanted you to find it while he could still be asked.”
PRUITT, BABY BOY
Inside the tin, on top, there was a paper band about the size of a watch strap.
It had gone the colour of a used tea bag. It said PRUITT, BABY BOY, and under that, 3-9-61.
Under the band was a photograph with a scalloped edge. A nurse in a white cap holding a baby up against her collar. His eyes were open. Somebody’s thumb had got into the corner of the picture.
Under the photograph there were papers folded in four.
I had a boy in March of 1961, and they told me he went in the night, and there is a flat stone out at Fairlawn with our name on it that I have been going to since Kennedy.
I put my hand down flat over the picture so Ruthie could not see it.
That was when the ladies got there. Somebody took my elbow. Somebody said sit her down. Somebody else was already saying she’s ninety, she’s had a day.
Colleen came across the hall with her coat half on and her keys in her fist.
Otis stayed where he was, by the coats, holding his cap in front of him with both hands.
“When was this took,” I said.
He said the date on the band was the date.
Colleen got the lid down and put her hand flat on the tin, the way you hold a door shut.
“Mom. People are looking.”
I have put flowers on that stone every April for sixty-five years. Emmett bought the plot. Emmett paid for the stone. Emmett drove me up there.
I said it out loud, to nobody in that room.
“Then what did we bury?”
Section C at Fairlawn
We were married in 1958 in his mother’s front room, because the church was being painted. I was twenty-two. Colleen came the next year, easy, eight pounds, born on a Sunday with the radio on.
The boy came in March of 1961 at the hospital in Millgate, and I did not get to see much of him.
They took him off down the hall, and then I got the fever, the one women used to get, and my mother stayed six weeks in my house with a rubber sheet on my mattress and Colleen down at my sister-in-law’s.
I remember the wallpaper in that room better than I remember the whole rest of that spring.
What I know, I was told by Emmett, sitting on the edge of the bed with his hat on his knee. The boy went in the night. There was no sense in me getting up for it. He would see to everything.
And he did see to everything. That was Emmett. Thirty-one years on the township road crew, out at four in the morning with the cinders, and in all that time he never once let me fill out a form.
He signed my name on the crew insurance every year of his life. He did it better than I do it. My L never closed at the bottom the way his did, and the man at the insurance office used to say we had the nicest handwriting in Cordry Township.
Section C is up the slope past the flagpole. The stone is flat, about the size of a bread board. It says PRUITT INFANT and that is the whole of it. No dates.
I asked him once, in the sixties, why there were no dates, and he said the man charged by the letter.
Sixty-five Aprils. Daffodils, then whatever was up.
He drove me every one of them and waited in the car, never getting out. Engine running, window down, cap on, listening to the ball game if there was one. He said cemeteries made his chest go tight, and I believed him for a lifetime, because why in the world would I not.
He would not drive through Rushton either. When we went out to my sister’s he took the reservoir road, eleven extra miles, and said the light on the square was a bad one.
Colleen put the tin in her trunk that night with the flower stands and the leftover ham.
“Nobody’s hiding anything, Mom,” she said. “I’m just not doing this in a church hall.”
Colleen
Tuesday morning she was at my kitchen table with a legal pad, and that is how I knew she had already decided.
She wrote down what I was allowed to want. A copy of the death certificate. That was the list.
If the certificate said what it ought to say, then a man of ninety-three had brought the wrong tin to a funeral and got a year wrong, and we would all have a cup of tea about it.
“You ran a hundred and four for six weeks,” she said. “You’ve told me your whole life you lost that spring.”
I called the county at nine. The woman took the name and the year and I could hear her typing.
Then she asked me for the file number off the certificate.
I said I did not have a certificate. I said we never had one, that I know of.
More typing. That woman had a cold. She kept swallowing and apologising for it.
“Ma’am,” she said, “I’ve got a birth for that name in March of ’61. I don’t have a death. Not that year, not any year.”
Colleen took the phone off me and gave the woman her own name and spelled it out and asked was the system down this morning. Then she hung up and told me records get lost, the courthouse annex flooded in ’72, everybody in this county knows that.
“Then we’ll go out to Fairlawn,” I said.
“For what?”
“For the card. They keep a card.”
She capped her pen.
“You want to dig up your own baby to prove a point about your husband.”
The interment card
The office at Fairlawn is a room off the garage where they keep the mowers, with a counter and a window unit that runs all year.
The girl behind it could not have been twenty-five. I gave her the section and the row and she said the old ones aren’t in the computer, they’re in the book.
She came back with a ledger with a cloth spine and set it on the counter turned around to face me, which was decent of her.
The plot was bought on the eleventh of March, 1961. Forty dollars. Cash. E. R. Pruitt, Cordry Township.
The stone was ordered the June after that. Twelve letters, it says, and the price of them.
Then there are the columns for the interment. The date, the name, the vault company, the crew that opened it, the crew that closed it.
Every one of them was blank.
She ran her finger down the page and turned the leaf over and came back and did it again.
Colleen said they must have written it in the wrong book.
The girl said the wrong book would still be a book, and the book would still say who was in the ground, and she had all of them from 1948 on the shelf behind her if we wanted to sit down.
Colleen went out to the car before I was finished reading.
The grave I had knelt at since 1961 had never been opened.
Under the cardboard
Trish brought the tin back to me Wednesday. She is Colleen’s girl, Ruthie’s mother, thirty-four, drives for the pharmacy. She took it out of her mother’s trunk while her mother was at work and did not tell her.
We went through it at my table under the good lamp.
The papers folded in four were a carbon, purple, of a county form. SURRENDER OF CUSTODY across the top, and the county children’s home at Rushton, and the date, the fourteenth of March, 1961.
Five days after he was born. Four days after the fever put me down.
The mother’s line had my name on it. Lorraine H. Pruitt, in ink, right where it belonged.
Trish read it twice and then went and stood at the sink.
I sat there and did the only arithmetic a woman can do at that table, which is that I signed my son away and could not remember doing it, and had been laying flowers on an empty box ever since to keep from knowing.
Then Trish came back and picked up the tin and said the inside was shallower than the outside.
There was a piece of cardboard cut to fit, wedged down under the lip with a matchstick. Under the cardboard there were nine slips of paper.
Some of them were ruled paper. Two were the backs of road-crew time cards.
Barnhart, Dale. Rushton. And an address on Klein Street. Then Klein Street crossed out and an address on the Ferndale pike, and that crossed out, and a route number after that.
1963, 1966, 1968, 1974, 1981, 1985, 1989, 1994.
All of it in Emmett’s hand, the same hand as my name upstairs on the form, thirty-one years of a man writing down where the boy had got to and then driving eleven miles around that town rather than through it.
The last slip is 1998 and it is not his writing. It is a telephone number, and under the number, two words.
Does not know.
Trish had the car keys in her hand before I asked her.
Otis Kepner rents the upstairs of a house on Water Street with an outside staircase.
He opened the door in that same jacket.
Two signatures on one card table
His front room has a card table in it and a dish of cough drops and a chair he keeps by the window for the light.
I put the carbon down on the table and turned it to face him, the way the girl at Fairlawn had done for me.
Then I took my pocketbook and got out the folder I keep of Emmett’s papers, because somebody in a house has to keep them, and I found the crew insurance from 1979, and I put that down beside it.
Two sheets. Eighteen years apart. My name on both of them.
The same L, that does not close at the bottom.
Otis looked at the two of them for a while. He has a magnifying glass on a string and he did not pick it up.
“I need you to tell me what I’m looking at,” I said.
“You know what you’re looking at.”
“Say it in this room.”
He put his hands flat on either side of the papers.
“He had it out to the truck and he couldn’t do it,” Otis said. “Not the mother’s line. He got the first letter down twice and quit. Your mother was in the front seat of my car with the baby’s things in her lap and the home closed at four.”
He moved the carbon a half inch, like it was crooked.
“I held the pen steady for him.”
He sat back.
“Then I drove your mother home, and she made supper, and I ate it.”
The number on the last slip
I put the 1998 slip on top of the form.
He did not need the magnifying glass for that one either.
“He gave up looking in ’94,” Otis said. “His eyes went and he wouldn’t ask me to drive him any more, so I did the last one on my own. Then in ’98 the phone rang here on a Sunday and a man told me he was born in Millgate in March of ’61 and he’d got a name off a woman at the home who wasn’t supposed to give it. He’d been at it eleven years. He asked me was I the Kepner on the witness line.”
“And you said.”
“I said I was.” He looked at the window. “He asked after his mother. And Emmett had told me in a truck in 1963 what I was to say to anybody that ever came asking, which was four words. Say she’s dead. That was the whole of it, and I have never once been able to think of a good reason he made me swear to it.”
“You told him I was dead.”
“He wanted a year off me and I had to give him one standing there. I said 1972, because that was the year my own mother went and it was the first year in my head.”
Trish said something with her hand over her mouth.
“He took it hard and he was decent about it,” Otis said. “He asked could he call at Christmas. He calls the week of Christmas. Twenty-seven years he’s called this number, and I ask after his knees, and his wife has sent me a fruit basket every year since her mother died.”
Colleen came up the outside stairs then. Trish had told her where we were, hours before, and she had driven from work and sat in the car first, because her coffee was still on the dash.
She read the two sheets on the table the way she reads everything, fast, and then she got very quiet and very reasonable.
She said her father was twenty-seven years old with a wife who was not expected to live and a two-year-old in another house. She said my mother signed the home’s papers as well, and I could go look. She said he kept a tin in a friend’s pocket for sixty-five years because he was ashamed, and shame is not a crime, and that a man does not get judged at ninety-two by a table full of people who were not in that truck.
“He forged my name, Colleen.”
“He carried you to the toilet that spring,” she said. “I’ve heard it from Grandma my whole life. Where’s his side of this? Who’s speaking for him now?”
Nobody said anything for a bit. Otis got up and moved the dish of cough drops for no reason.
“I’m going to Rushton,” I said.
Colleen picked her keys up off the table.
“Then I’m not part of it. I’m not standing at two funerals for the same man.” She got to the door and stopped. “You’ll want to sit down when you tell people what he did. You go white.”
I heard her car turn around down there.
I told Otis I was mailing the carbon to that route number Thursday morning, and that his name was on the witness line and would still be on it when it got there. He could be the one who says it first or he could be a signature on a piece of paper a stranger reads at his own kitchen table.
He sat down by the window with the phone in his lap and dialled it out of his head.
“It’s Kepner,” he said. “I’m going to hand you to somebody.”
Rushton, the fourth of October
Trish drove me out three weeks after, in the rain, with Ruthie in the back seat and her library book about horses.
The stone is home, leaning face-in against my garage. The monument works wants a hundred and ten to haul it and I have not called them, and I water the hydrangea right past it every other day.
Colleen came for Emmett’s chair on a Sunday and did not come in the house. She backed the truck up and she and her husband took it off the porch. She wanted it. I told her to take it.
The place on the route number is aluminium siding with a ramp built onto the front steps and a wind chime made out of forks.
He had told me on the phone not to bring anything.
I brought the tin.
We sat in the car a minute because Trish had the wipers going and I was doing my hair.
“Nana,” Ruthie said. “That man’s been standing behind the door a long time.”
Then the screen door came open, and a heavy man of sixty-five in a work shirt stood there holding it with his foot the way Emmett used to.
“Come in out of it, then,” he said.
If this one got to you, send it to whoever in your family keeps everything in a drawer nobody is allowed in. Ask them what’s in there while you can still ask.
If you’re looking for more tales that linger, you might enjoy “My Mother Wore That Blue at Fenwick for Nine Years. I Wore It Onstage.” or perhaps “The Janitor Put My Last Name on a Folder at the Board Meeting” for another unexpected encounter. And for a different kind of mystery, “My Daughter’s Sitter Had a Locked Room I Was Never Supposed to See” is sure to intrigue.
