The smell of cold iron and damp wool always stays in the back of my throat whenever I think about that Tuesday afternoon in November. I was sitting at the oilcloth-covered kitchen table in our little house outside of Beatrice, Nebraska, staring down at a Bible verse I had copied out on the back of an electric bill. Psalm 18:32. It was supposed to be a comfort. My husband Arthur had bought me that small black New King James version down at the Methodist book kiosk three years before, back when things were still quiet between us and we didn’t spend our evenings staring at opposite walls.
Arthur was out in the shed behind the garage, and I could hear the rhythmic clatter of his socket wrench hitting the concrete floor. He had been working on the transmission of that old gray Ford pickup for nearly four weeks, though the truck hadn’t moved out of the weeds by the fence line in two summers. Every few minutes the rhythmic banging would stop, and I would hear him muttering to himself, his voice muffled by the rusted siding of the shed. I didn’t think much of it then. I just kept smoothing the corner of the electric bill down with my thumb, trying to make the ink stop smudging where my palm had gotten damp.
The house had been too quiet all morning, the kind of quiet where you can hear the pilot light on the gas stove clicking every thirty seconds like a tiny metal clock. I had spent the morning canning four quarts of spiced crab apples, and the heavy smell of cloves and white vinegar still hung thick in the air.
My apron was stained purple down the front where a hot jar had slipped while I was sealing the lids. Arthur came in through the back door without wiping his boots, tracking red clay across the linoleum right over the spot I had just mopped.
“You got any cash in that tin in the pantry?” he asked. He didn’t look at me. He walked straight to the sink, turned the cold water tap on full blast, and splashed his face with his bare hands, shaking his head like a dog coming out of a pond.
“I have the grocery money for the week,” I said, keeping my eyes fixed on the electric bill. “Seventy-two dollars. But we need fifty of that for the propane delivery on Thursday, Arthur.”
He shut the water off with a hard jerk of his wrist. He didn’t use the roller towel hanging by the icebox, just wiped his face with his forearm, leaving a streak of dark grease right across his stubbled jaw. “Seventy-two dollars won’t cover what I need,” he said.
His voice was flat, the way it always got right before he started pacing. “Just give me the tin, Clara. I need to run down to town.”
“Run down to town for what?” I asked. I finally looked up from the table, watching the way his shoulders squared under his gray flannel shirt. There was a small tear right near the right pocket where he had caught it on a rusty nail three weeks ago. I remember thinking I should mend it that evening, but I never did.
Arthur turned around and leaned back against the counter, crossing his arms over his chest. “I found a buyer for the boat motor, Clara. Down in Tecumseh. But I need gas money and a twenty-dollar fee to clear the title transfer with the county clerk before he backs out.”
The boat motor had been sitting under a tarp in the corner of the machine shed since my brother Gene passed away four winters ago.
Gene had left it to Arthur in his will, along with a rusted set of socket wrenches and a Winchester rifle that didn’t have any firing pin. Arthur swore up and down back then that he was going to clean it up and take me out on the reservoir once the weather cleared. We never went. Every time I brought it up, he said the carburetor needed a part that was too hard to find.
“That motor belongs to both of us,” I said, and my voice sounded smaller than I wanted it to. “Gene left it so we’d have something if things got tight.”
“Things are tight right now,” Arthur said, and he pushed off the counter, taking two steps toward the table. “That’s why I’m selling the damn thing. Give me the tin.”
Three weeks later. The snow had started coming down in thin, gray needles that didn’t stick to the gravel driveway yet, just turned the mud into a slick, dark paste. I was sitting at the same table, but the electric bill was gone, replaced by a yellow carbon-copy receipt from the First National Bank in town and a bank statement that made the room feel suddenly very small. I didn’t cry. I don’t think I had any tears left after the morning he didn’t come home for breakfast.
Arthur hadn’t gone to Tecumseh. He hadn’t sold Gene’s boat motor either, because when I finally walked out to the shed with the spare key later that afternoon, the tarp was still frozen to the dirt and the motor was right where it had always been, coated in a thick layer of chaff and dust. What he had sold was the small certificate of deposit my mother had left me when she passed away down in Pawnee City. Five thousand six hundred dollars, put away for a rainy day that had apparently finally arrived without my permission.
The bank teller, a young girl named Missy who went to church with my second cousin, had looked at me over the top of her wire-rimmed glasses when I walked in with the statement clutched in my hand. “Mr. Arthur came in on the fourteenth, Mrs. Miller,” she said, her voice dropping down to that careful, quiet pitch people use when they’re talking to someone who just got bad news at the clinic. “He said you both agreed to roll the balance over into his commercial account for the truck parts.”
I stood there in the linoleum-floored lobby of the bank, listening to the hum of the fluorescent ceiling lights overhead. I remember looking down at my own shoes. I had put on my good black walking shoes with the rubber soles, but one of the laces was frayed near the eyelet where I had tied it in a rush that morning.
“We didn’t agree,” I said.
Missy didn’t say anything for a second, and honestly that felt worse than if she had argued with me. She just slid a yellow withdrawal slip across the laminate counter with Arthur’s messy signature scrawled across the bottom line in blue ballpoint ink. The ‘A’ in his name looked like a crooked tent.
“I’m sorry, Clara,” she whispered. “I thought you knew.”
I walked out of the bank without asking for a manager and without calling him on the telephone. The wind had picked up off the flats, blowing dry corn husks across the empty parking lot until they hit the side of my station wagon with tiny, dry taps. I got in behind the wheel, turned the key, and waited for the engine to catch. It took three tries before the starter finally groaned and turned over, the dashboard lights flickering weak and yellow against the gray afternoon.
When I got back to the house, Arthur’s work jacket was gone from the peg by the back door, and his Sears toolbox was missing from the corner of the porch. The shed door was swinging open in the wind, banging against the weathered cedar siding with a hollow, rhythmic thud that sounded like someone knocking from the inside of a closet.
I went inside and sat down at the kitchen table. The house was cold because Arthur hadn’t gone down to the cellar to shake down the furnace before he left, and the iron radiators were already starting to ping as they cooled down for the evening. I reached into my apron pocket and pulled out the small black New King James Bible he had given me three years ago. I opened it to the marker ribbon, a faded green piece of grosgrain ribbon he had cut off a Christmas box.
Psalm 18:32 was still underlined in red pen where I had marked it that morning. It is God who arms me with strength and makes my way perfect.
I sat there for a long time watching the light fade from the kitchen window until I couldn’t see the lines on the page anymore. The banging of the shed door out in the yard finally stopped when the wind shifted around to the north, leaving just the sound of the refrigerator motor kicking on with a low, familiar shudder. Arthur hadn’t left a note, and he hadn’t taken his spare boots from the mudroom. He had just taken the money and the truck, leaving the gray Ford sitting out in the weeds with its hood propped open to the cold November rain.
