What Remained in the Desk Drawer When I Found My Own Obituary
The envelope drawer on the left side of Arthur’s oak roll-top always stuck on the third pull, requiring a sharp, upward tug that usually rattled the spare brass keys and the little tin box of paper clips. I was looking for a book of four-cent stamps, the old ones we had left over from when the post office raised the rate three winters ago, because I needed to mail the quarterly sewer district slip before Saturday or face the late penalty.
The house was quiet in that heavy, flat way it gets around three in the afternoon when the sun drops behind the high pasture ridge and the wind dies down to nothing. Arthur was out by the implement shed checking the grease fittings on the manure spreader, moving slow the way he’d been moving since the first hard frost of November, his heavy canvas barn coat hanging off his shoulders like it belonged to a bigger man. I yanked the drawer, it gave way with its usual stubborn snap, and there right on top of the old tax receipts was my face.
It wasn’t a bad picture. It was the one my niece Chloe took of me last Easter Sunday down by the old lilac hedge before we went inside for ham and scalloped potatoes, back when I still had some color in my cheeks and wasn’t wearing three layers of wool just to sit in the kitchen.
But someone had taken scissors to it. Not clumsy scissors either, but sharp shears that had trimmed away the background until there was nothing left of Chloe’s hand or the rusted wheelbarrow or the white boards of the barn wall. Just me, floating on a square of white bond paper like I was being pinned to a board for a county fair exhibit. It looked clean, almost clinical, the kind of stiff likeness they paste onto the front of a funeral program when the family doesn’t have anything recent and natural to give the printer. I reached down to move it out of the way, thinking maybe he was framing something for the hall, and my fingers hit the stack underneath.
The top sheet was heavy, watermarked stationery from the agricultural supply office in town, but it wasn’t an invoice for seed corn or fencing wire. It was typed out in Arthur’s slow, two-finger hunt-and-peck style that always sounded like small pistol shots coming from the den late at night when the television was off.
Born, it said. Married, it said. Survived by. My name was right there under the heading, spelled out with my maiden name included the way nobody except my brother had called me since 1984. Below that came the paragraph about my years volunteering at the church rummage sale and my short stint on the library board back when we still lived down on the county road. It was an obituary. My obituary. Written out in careful, stiff prose that sounded just like Arthur when he had to stand up at the Grange hall and read the yearly treasurer’s report. I sat there in his leather desk chair with my own death notice in my hand, and for a long minute the room felt very small, like the walls were leaning inward to see what I was going to do next.
Underneath the typed sheet were two glossy color brochures from the Memorial Gardens out on Route 4, the ones with the neat green lawns and the marble benches positioned under weeping willows that never seemed to grow any taller year after year.
I didn’t open them. I didn’t have to. Clipped to the back of the second brochure was a white bank notice dated January fourth, showing that our monthly automatic debit for the mutual life policy we’d held since the Bicentennial had jumped from eighty-four dollars to four hundred and thirty-seven dollars. Four hundred and thirty-seven dollars a month. That was more than we spent on groceries in two weeks, more than the power bill during the coldest January we’d had in a decade. Arthur had signed the authorization slip in his neat, cramped hand right across the bottom line without saying a word to me over breakfast, while the coffee was still hot and the radio was playing the market report.
I stayed in that chair until the light coming through the small west window turned the color of old brass. My mind kept jumping from one stupid thing to another, the way it does when you get hit by something you weren’t bracing for, like a branch falling out of a dead oak during a dead calm. I thought about the winter coats in the hall closet and whether I’d marked the boxes of winter potatoes down in the fruit cellar properly so they wouldn’t rot before March. I thought about how Arthur hadn’t let me drive the pickup to town on Tuesday even though my arthritis wasn’t acting up nearly as bad as usual, insisting he had to stop by the hardware store anyway for three-inch carriage bolts we didn’t end up needing. I don’t even know why I remember that bolt part now, but it stuck in my head like a burr in a wool sock. I sat there turning those papers over and over until my thumbs left gray smudges on the white bond, wondering if I’d missed some sign that my life was slipping away from me while I was busy putting up strawberry jam and cleaning out the gutters.
The kitchen clock was clicking four minutes fast when I finally stood up and pushed the drawer shut with my hip. I didn’t put the papers back the way I found them. I left them right there in a heap on the green blotter where anyone sitting down could see them, though Arthur wasn’t the kind of man who left his desk messy ever since his father taught him how to keep farm books during the drought years. I went to the sink and ran cold water over my wrists until the skin went tight and prickly, then I wiped my hands on the roller towel by the door and waited for the sound of the tractor coming back up the lane.
Arthur didn’t put the machine in the shed tonight. He left it idling by the water tank for a long time, the old diesel engine coughing out that thin blue smoke that always smelled like unburnt fuel and hard work, before he finally pulled the hand throttle and killed it. I watched him climb down off the iron step very carefully, grabbing the handrail with his left hand and waiting a second to get his balance before his boots hit the gravel. He didn’t rush. He never rushed. He walked over to the horse trough, dipped his gray work cap into the water to wash the grease off his forehead, and then stood there looking out over the bottom pasture where the cows were bunching up by the creek.
I didn’t wait for him to come inside and wash up at the basin the way he usually did. I pushed the screen door open and walked out onto the wooden porch, the boards cold through the thin soles of my house shoes. He heard the latch click and turned around, holding his wet cap by the brim, his face looking tired and yellowish under the evening sky that had turned the color of a greasy tin pail.
“Supper’s about twenty minutes off,” I said, and my voice sounded thinner than I meant it to, like dry grass snapping in the wind. “I found the stamps. In the bottom of the roll-top.”
Arthur didn’t jump. He didn’t drop his hat or look away toward the barn the way a man does when he’s been caught doing something he shouldn’t. He just stood there by the porch post with his shoulders rounded inside that heavy canvas coat, looking at me with those pale blue eyes that had seen forty years of bad weather and low prices without ever once blinking out.
“Ruthie,” he said, and his voice was lower than usual, almost gravelly from the dust off the spreader. “I didn’t want you routing around in there yet. I was going to tell you come Saturday when the accountant brought the final papers out from town.”
“You wrote out my funeral,” I said. I didn’t yell. You don’t yell at Arthur after four decades of living twenty feet apart on seventy acres of river bottom; it doesn’t do any good and it just makes your throat hurt for nothing. “You had my picture cut down like I was already pasted into a ledger, and you upped the insurance four hundred dollars a month behind my back. I want to know who you think is going to pay the feed bill if I’m the one who goes down first.”
He didn’t answer right away. He looked down at his hat, his thumb rubbing the frayed edge of the brim where he’d held it a million times while talking to the seed man or the implement dealer. Then he did something that stopped me harder than if he’d thrown a bucket of ice water off the porch roof. He reached out and took my right hand in his, his palm hard as a dried cornhusk, his fingers stiff with the rheumatism he never complained about, and he squeezed it once, hard, the way he hadn’t done since our youngest boy was buried forty years ago out behind the church.
“Ruthie,” he said, and his breath caught just a little bit before the word came out clean and level. “It’s not your funeral I’ve been planning.”
The wind came up then, rattling the dry cornstalks down in the creek bottom and making the porch chains give that high, thin squeak that meant the weather was turning again before morning. I stood there with my hand in his, feeling the rough skin and the heat coming off him, waiting for him to finish whatever it was he’d been carrying around in that big chest of his since January without letting a single word drop between us at the oilcloth table.
“Doctor Henderson called me out of his office two weeks before the snow started,” Arthur said, and he finally looked up, his eyes steady and clear in the gray light coming off the gravel. “My ticker’s been missing steps since the haying season, Ruthie. He told me straight out I’ve got maybe six months before this old pump gives out entirely, and that’s if I take it easy and don’t lift anything heavier than a bucket of mash.”
I couldn’t breathe for a second. My ribs felt like they’d been bound up in baling wire, tight and dry, and the sound of the creek down in the pasture seemed to go very far away.
“You went to town,” I said. “You went to Henderson’s office three different times in November and told me you were just getting your knee looked at.”
“I didn’t want you sitting here alone worrying while I was out in the field,” he said, and a little flicker of that old stubborn look came into the corners of his mouth. “If I’m going to drop between the rows, I wanted the place clear. But when I sat down at that desk to write out what needed doing, who gets the tractor, where the deed goes, how you’re going to keep the taxes paid without me down at the bank every month, I couldn’t get my own name down on the paper, Ruthie. Every time I tried to write ‘Arthur Vance, deceased,’ my hand just stopped moving. It felt like a lie before it even dried.”
He reached into the deep pocket of his barn coat with his free hand and pulled out a folded piece of yellow legal pad paper, the edges frayed where he’d carried it around in his shirt pocket through the cold mornings. He handed it to me, and I unfolded it under the amber light of the porch bulb that had just clicked on automatically as the sun went down behind the ridge.
It wasn’t an obituary. It was a list of every single thing I’d ever mentioned wanting to fix around the house since we put the new roof on back in ninety-eight. The back porch screen that always stuck when it rained, the cellar door hinges that needed greasing, the name of the man two townships over who bought good hay by the ton so I wouldn’t have to deal with the brokers in town when the winter got long. Every line was written in that same stiff, careful printing, but the farther down the page you went, the more the letters started to slant sideways until they ran right off the margin into the white space.
“I couldn’t look at my own face,” Arthur whispered, and for the first time since I’d known him, his voice sounded thin, like an old fence wire humming in a gale. “So I used yours just to see how the lines went down. I needed to know the farm would stay yours without the county taking half of it for probate fees. That’s why the insurance went up. Henderson said if I go sudden, the probate on the machinery alone would eat the house before you could get the signature through.”
I stood there on the porch with the yellow paper in one hand and his old, grease-stained fingers in the other, and all that dark, ugly suspicion I’d dragged out of the desk drawer just drifted off into the dark like wood smoke from the chimney. There was no secret life, no other woman, no bad debts hidden away in a drawer in town. Just a seventy-two-year-old man who didn’t know how to say *I’m scared of dying* without turning it into a set of farm instructions and a life insurance rider.
“You’re a stubborn old fool, Arthur Vance,” I said, and my voice shook just enough that he knew I wasn’t just making talk.
“I know,” he said, and he gave my hand another one of those dry, hard squeezes before he let go to turn the doorknob. “Supper’s getting cold inside. You go on in and pour the coffee, and I’ll come wash up the grease before we talk about what we’re telling the boys on Sunday.”
We went inside together, the screen door slamming behind us with its familiar, heavy rattle, and for the first time all winter the house didn’t feel too big for the two of us. I walked straight past the roll-top desk without looking at the left-hand drawer, went to the stove to turn the burner down under the kettle, and waited for him to come in out of the dark.
