Chapter 8 The Year of Nails

Ida Roegner had lived on the north quarter of section eight for fifty-four of the sixty-eight years since her second husband put her out of the house on the county road with, in his words, no truck and no prospects, and the reason she had stayed, when other people would have understood the leaving, was the tree. It was a silver maple at the top of the lane where the lane turns to go down into the bottom, and it had four inches of bark left on the south side and a hollow you could put both arms into, and there were nails in it. Corrine had grown up being told about the nails the way children are told about a coin at the bottom of a garden, as a thing to be discovered rather than explained. She went up there on a Tuesday in May with a notebook and no particular plan, because there was nothing in the field she was allowed to do yet. She found them at about chest height, in a rough band about eight inches long, on the trunk side that faces the low ground. Eleven nails, flat-headed, spaced about the width of two fingers, driven in a long time ago by somebody with a hammer and a purpose. Two had rusted through and fallen. One, at the end of the band, was bright. The bright one was new. She stood there a while with her hand flat on the bark over it. Then she went down to Ida Roegner's kitchen, which smelled of kerosene and lemon and the particular sourness of a house with an older woman in it, and she sat at the table without being asked and said, "How many nails was it." "Depends what you're after." "I'm after the year." Ida Roegner looked at her for a moment over the rim of her cup. "Your daddy put them up when he was a boy. Which was a long time, and it was the year he was fifteen, which was 1974, which is the year somebody finally went and looked for the culvert." Corrine set her cup down. "How do you know the year he was fifteen." "Because I asked him, and because a fifteen-year-old let alone on a place will put a nail in a tree for anything at all, and I have watched every child in this township do it, and it is always the same three things. It is a fish, or a girl, or a number somebody said out loud in front of them." Ida Roegner reached over and moved the band-aid box a foot to the left on the table, for no reason she gave. "He did not have a fish that year, because you were a baby and nobody had time for the creek. And there was no girl, because the girl there was me, and I was thirty-one, and I was busy." "So it was a number." "It was a number," the old woman said. "And I will tell you what I think it was, though you should not take a thing I think for evidence." She turned the cup a quarter turn, which Corrine had been copying out of that kitchen since she was nine without ever knowing it. "I think it was the cost. Or whatever they came to on it. Your daddy was fifteen and his own father was in the county house that August with a bad back and a worse temper, and the boy was in and out of the truck all week while they worked, and if a man of fifty who does not like being asked questions stands in a ditch and reads a card out loud to a boy who is helping him hold a board, then that number is in the boy's head for the rest of his life. And then in 1998 he reads a card that says everything is fine, and the number he has been carrying all that time turns out to be the answer to a question nobody ever asked him." Corrine had to look out of the window. "Is that why you kept it." "I kept it because he gave it to me." Ida Roegner's voice did not change by a degree. "I have never been certain those are two different reasons. It might be one reason, drawn out at length. People like me do not get two reasons." "That's the question." Ida Roegner got up, went to the drawer, took out a folded piece of cardboard with the counties' extension bulletins on it and a pencil mark of a section number, and laid it on the table. "That came in the mail in 1998. I showed it to you and you were busy with your phone. It says the low area south of the lane on that section was inspected in connection with the district's review of drainage structures, and it gives a date in the first week of August, and it gives the inspector's initials, which are E.D., and it gives a note at the bottom in the same print, and the note says: obstruction located and removed at turn in lane, freeboard restored, outfall verified." "E.D." "Your daddy was not the only person in this county who ever dug a ditch." Ida Roegner took her cup back. "He was the one who told me about it, that's all. He came in the September of 1974 and he said his cousin Eldon had been out in August with a crew and had found the culvert where she'd said it would be, and had it out and cleaned and put a new grate on it, and that the water had gone off her ground in about four hours." Corrine looked at the bulletin. The extension office had a different logo by 1998 and a different address, and the paper had gone soft along one fold the way all the paper in that house had gone soft along some fold or other. "This says removed," she said. "It says removed. I was the one who read it out to him." "You said an inspection." "I said an inspection. I said it the way the paper says it, and the paper says what I just told you." Ida Roegner turned her cup. "Miss Ambrose, I am eighty years old and I have one good ear and I have never once in my life been uncertain about a date I heard with it. He said inspected. He said the words inspected and he said E.D. and then he said, and I will give you this exactly, he said, so somebody wrote it down that way, and I said, well, they did, and he said, they did, and I watched his face for about a minute and it was the face of a man reading a check." "A check?" "A man deciding whether to cash it." She put her hand flat on the table, an echo so exact that Corrine felt something give in her chest that was not grief and was not anger either. "He did not say it out loud. He never said it out loud. He put the nails in and he went home and he worked the shop for forty years and he did not take it up again, and he died in the front room in that house on a Tuesday in the winter without ever telling anybody what he had found. And I have kept that paper since 1998 because he gave it to me when he read it to me, and I have never had a reason to throw away a thing a man handed you on purpose." Corrine sat very still. "What would that have been worth in 1974?" The old woman was quiet for a while. Out the window the Roegner yard went up to the second fence line and then to the mowed strip, and beyond the strip the ground began its long fall toward the water in the bottom. "Your daddy," Ida Roegner said, "could have bought the field for a third of what he bought his first tractor for." "He never told my mother that." "He never told anybody that. I am the only person left who knows he said it, and I am eighty, and that is the entire estate." She set her cup down. "And I will tell you the thing I did not say, because you have come up here twice this spring and put your hands in my kitchen table and asked me questions, and you are the first person from that family since 1998 who has asked me one. I said it in 1974 to a fifteen-year-old boy because I was thirty-one and lonely and he had a good face for a thing that has no use. And what I said was this." She waited until Corrine looked at her. "He could have bought the field. That is the whole of it. I never had the money and I never wanted the money and I was not offering anything to anybody, I was only saying out loud the thing nobody in this township would say, which is that a thing you will not say out loud is a thing that stays on the books forever and gets collected by somebody who is not even in the family." Her hand went flat on the tablecloth. "And in 1998 I gave him the paper because I had decided that he ought to have heard it from a person rather than from the mail, and he did, and he read it, and he looked at my face, and then he put it in his pocket and he never mentioned it again in twenty-seven years." Corrine sat with her hands around a cup she had not drunk from. "Is that what the nails were." "The nails were a boy of fifteen being fifteen," Ida Roegner said. "Everything else I told you is a woman of eighty being eighty. Don't mix them up. It is the only advice I have got left and it has taken me sixty years and a divorce to be able to give it." ---