Ebeling Hardware as I remembered it had dark wood counters with open bins of nails and bolts, cabinets for small parts, a comfortable feeling of preparedness. When I stopped in after Christmas this year, high metal display racks filled the middle of the store, loaded with small appliances, home decorating hardware and cooking utensils, obscuring the checkout counter in the rear across from where the steps go down to the basement. They were into horses too, the plastic ones girls collect in the years before they get their first period, plus stuff for real horses. Just inside the front door, a life-size black and white fiberglass pinto stood fitted with a bridle and blanket.
On the left of a narrow aisle, across from reels of galvanized chain, a yellow cast metal road grader caught my eye. It was part of a fleet of miniature earthmoving equipment arranged in a glass-fronted cabinet. My grandson was into “diggers.” The grader would be perfect. They had just one left, amid tractors and wagons, dump trucks, backhoes and bulldozers, built-to-scale earth-expert machines in John Deere Green and the creamy yellow acquired by road machinery after long days in the sun.
A lady ahead of me at the counter was buying some shelf brackets. They had six inch and eight inch. She went for the eight inch.
“You can return them for the six inch if they’re not right.” The clerk dropped the brackets into a brown paper bag without a logo. “Do you have one of our new calendars?”
She was a sturdy woman with tightly curled dark hair, glasses and a blue apron that came up just short of the neck. The woman with the brackets had not gotten a new calendar. The clerk handed her a white envelope from a stack piled by the register.
Varnished dark wood ran along the edge of the Formica counter, past an aluminum scoop sticking out of a wide-mouth jar of glistening amber candy raisins, just like when I used to come here in the eighth grade. The woman with the new shelf brackets thanked the clerk and left, her calendar’s unsealed envelope flap hanging open.
I have to get one of those, I thought. I was betting on a picture for each month of the year, local scenes. I paid cash for the road grader, setting it on a patch of counter where beige had worn through to chocolate brown. Sure enough, she asked.
“Do you have one of our new calendars?” She gave me change for the road grader, handing me the calendar with a pleasant smile.
“Thanks,” I said. The envelope was snowy white, about an inch wider on each side than its contents whose edges were palpable through the paper. I turned around, sensing someone in line behind me.
Gerald had a fresh violet scar running down his cheek from his right temple to just above the jut of his jawbone. I hadn’t seen him for probably twenty years and hadn’t actually talked with him for forty. Other than the scar, he had the same angular sunburned face, the same quiet blue eyes beneath a black wool visor cap, its ear flaps tied up at the top in a small bow. Checkered flannel padding showed at the edges of his denim jacket.
“Hello, Gerald,” I said. The words came out gently, probably because I was surprised by his scar, so fresh. He moved his weight to the other leg and tapped it with a big gray rubberized flashlight he was holding, the kind that gets advertised as “weatherproof” and “heavy duty.”
“Doesn’t work.” He didn’t press the on/off button, just stood and waited. He said it as if either he did not remember me at all or I was so completely remembered that acknowledgement of my name was unnecessary.
Gerald wasn’t getting any younger. He couldn’t have expected to run into me. Maybe he never addressed anyone by name. I shook his hand. It was callused and warm. His eyes seemed searching above graying stubble.
The Ebeling on duty came over from the next aisle.
“This flashlight doesn’t work,” Gerald offered, holding it up, this time flicking the button on and off to show nothing happened.
“Let me have a look.” You could tell right away he was an Ebeling, round-faced, capable, with a ballpoint pen in his shirt pocket.
I nodded goodbye to Gerald and walked out the front of the store, my footsteps thunking over the wood between the coffeepots and racks of chain and rope to where the plastic horse gazed out across the blacktop road.
Late one afternoon forty years before, Gerald’s little brother Vernon got caught in a corn chopper. I never got over wondering how it must have been for him, a sixth grader yanking on stiff greenish-yellow stalks behind the orange tractor, feeling a sudden tug as the red conveyor of the machine gripped his sleeve and pulled him in, anticipating in lonely horror the clean surprise of knives before they took the ends of his fingers, then the knuckles, inching higher until his body blocked the influx, too large to enter the chute.
Ronny, a friend of Gerald’s, said Gerald told him that the day after it happened he walked out to the field where the tractor sat and began driving it toward the barn with its partial load of chopped corn. There was a spot in the woods he passed, an opening into which he could back the wagon and dump the load. I imagined it as a place where he stopped occasionally afterward, with the tractor turned off and blue sky overhead as the seasons went along, the load’s outline beneath red and gold maple leaves followed by the overlying snow becoming gradually smaller and after a few years melting nearly away, perhaps some stalks of corn growing in an unfamiliar place the first spring and after that, nothing.
I drove down the hill from Ebeling’s, the yellow road grader in its pasteboard and cellophane package on the passenger seat. I imagined how a person might go about starting up a hardware store these days. You’d probably need a theme, maybe a logo. The easiest might be to get a franchise and color code yourself (orange or red maybe, something powerful).
What isn’t usually in the picture these days is the basement underneath the store where you repair screens in the late winter, keep plumbing stuff for outcalls, listen to people walking on the creaky wood overhead while you cut and thread pipe. Still, you try to stock stuff people need and to be there when they come in for faucet parts, for packaged fasteners, for grass seed.
The problem with the color-coded model is that you don’t know the stories. You don’t end up being a place where people let down when they meet someone they know. You have to be efficient because it’s a big box and everybody has stuff they want to check out and push their cart across the parking lot to their car and leave the cart at the cart corral.
My father was the pastor of the village church a mile from the field where Vernon died. The police chief knew him, called him to the scene. I remember him saying the chief was crying. I could see it in my mind as if it were a movie I wasn’t supposed to be watching. It never went away.
The white envelope, propped on the seat behind the road grader, flopped forward when I turned onto the highway. I pulled over and slid out the calendar.
It’s quite a thing. There is only one picture, a southern Wisconsin scene but nobody’s place I recognize. It’s a photograph of a spring pasture with a dozen Black Angus cows and several calves, a bright red barn with a gray metal roof, a cobalt sky, a few puffy white clouds. It’s oddly pleasant, with newly leafed trees countering a dead elm by the creek and in the distance, a leftover windmill. Most of the cows stand head-deep in overpoweringly green grass between patches of yellow flowers. The calves look at the camera.
The whole calendar part is complex, very analog. The cows’ picture on the top half is actually the front panel of an envelope. A black string runs through little brass eyelets at the corners of the picture, so that when the calendar is hung on the wall you can tip the cows and their pasture forward, revealing the phrase “For Mail Storage” on the inside back of the envelope.
Each of the months on the bottom half is a separate sheet folded as a pocket. The dates are very easy to read with Sundays, federal and Christian holidays in red. There isn’t much space in the square around the number to write what you have to do that day.
On the pocket for each month in small letters it says, “For Bills and Receipts.” At the end of the month you can tear it off from the two staples holding the year together and start over.
I don’t think I’ll hang it up. I don’t really keep track of things in my life that way. My life feels sort of digital. But the more I look at it, the more I’m getting used to the idea of continual increments, month after month going through what comes into a life and what goes out, trying to break even.
Maybe that’s as good as closure gets.
Of course, there will be carry-overs from time to time. January is done, tear off the sheet. Make adjustments.
Start February.
In New Letters, vol. 79, No. 2, 2013