I take pictures for a living and I know better than anybody that one film is not a finding. You pull the old one and you lay them side by side and the slow thing shows up in the difference. I never once ran a comparison on my own husband.
In March of 2014 Lane came in from the shop at nine at night with sawdust down his front and told me he had figured out what to do about the coffee.
Terry has had no coffee after two in the afternoon for six years, and he had it worked out. A trailer, one of the little ones. Pull it up by the post office in the morning and out to the sale barn on sale days. He had the trailer picked. He had talked to a man in Glendive about a roaster. He stood in my kitchen with his hands going and he was forty-eight years old and lit up like a boy, and he said the thing he says, which is and the beauty of it is, and then he told me the beauty of it.
“Which trailer.”
“Boyum’s got that little one behind his shop.”
“That’s the one with the floor out of it.”
“Floor’s a weekend.”
I said nothing at all for a second and then I said, “Lane.”
That was all I said. That one word has taken up about as much of my thinking as anything ever has.
He said, “Yeah,” and put both hands in his pockets, and then ran himself a glass of water and drank it at the sink looking out at nothing, and then went up.
That trailer is still behind Boyum’s shop. There is no coffee in Terry after two in the afternoon.
I had a sentence by then, and I did not make it, and I want it up here at the top. In 2014 I ran into Lorna at a funeral in Glendive, who was married to my husband for six years before I was, and we stood outside by the cars for twenty minutes and she was decent to me the whole time, and at the finish of it she said, “He falls in love with beginnings, Dorrie.”
And then she said, “You get to be a beginning for about two years.”
I used that for eleven years, and not privately.
Every Foot Is Paid For
Here is the exhibit list, and I could do it in my sleep because I have done it at tables.
A lawn and rock outfit in 2005 that lasted two summers. Hunting leases, which he brokered for out-of-state bird hunters for three seasons and was good at and quit. A row of storage units at the edge of town he got two-thirds of the way through and sold to a man from Sidney at a loss. A portable sawmill he still has. A coffee trailer he never bought. And the fence.
Lane builds fence now and has for nine years, which is the longest he has ever done any one thing, and he is the best in three counties and everybody knows it. Corner braces you could hang a truck off. He bids by the foot.
Every foot is paid for. That is his line and he says it about fence and he means it about the place.
We have a hundred and sixty acres and a house and a shop out on the Sunday Creek road and no note has ever been carried on one inch of it. Not a mortgage, not an operating loan, not a payment on a vehicle since 1998. He bought this place in six pieces across fourteen years, cash every time, and there were years in the middle of that when we did not have a couch.
I filed that under his oddities. If you had asked me, in 2019, to name a thing my husband had been consistent about, I would have had to sit there and think, and I would have sat there some while, and I do not believe it would have come to me.
Sawyer, our daughter, said to me in the truck when she was about sixteen, “Dad’s actually good at fence.”
“He is.”
“Like, everybody says he’s the best one.”
“He is,” I said. “For now.”
She is twenty-four and works at the clinic in Baker and I would give a good deal to have that sentence back out of the truck.
What They Say, and What They Would Say About Her
Not one person in this county has ever been unkind to me about Lane and nobody has ever taken it seriously either.
It comes out as fondness. Old Lane’s got a new one going. What’s he into this month. A man at the bar in Terry told me once, meaning it as a compliment, that my husband was the most interesting man in Prairie County and the worst businessman in it, and he laughed and I laughed and that is where this county has stood on my husband for twenty-one years without moving.
What I did not think about until this year is what the same behavior gets called on a woman. There is a woman I know in Circle who has started about as many things as Lane has. Interesting is not a word anybody uses on her. She gets flighty, and unstable, and there is a thing people say about the state of her house, and no man in a bar has ever told her husband she was the most interesting person in the county. A whole other weather system comes down on her and somebody else will have to describe it.
Worth knowing, and it cost me nothing to know it, and I would rather put down the part that did.
That bar has had me in it. I have laughed at it. When a man tells your husband’s wife that her husband is the worst businessman in the county, what he is telling her is that he has decided the two of you are a joke he is allowed to be in on, and every woman married to a man like this knows what the correct response is, which is to laugh a little bit harder than he did so nobody has to feel anything.
At a table in this house, at Sawyer’s graduation supper in 2019, in front of my sister and Lane’s brother and a girl Sawyer went to school with, I did Lorna’s sentence out loud with Lane sitting there.
“He falls in love with beginnings,” I said. “You get about two years.”
Everybody laughed. Lane laughed.
After a while he got up and went out and stood in the yard, which he does, and my sister said something about men and I do not remember what.
Officer School
In 2002 Lane went to the law enforcement academy at Helena. He was thirty-one. He had wanted it since he was a kid.
He got through eight weeks and came home.
That is the centerpiece. That is the one every person in this family reaches for. His mother reached for it. His brother reaches for it at Christmas in a way that is supposed to be affectionate. I have reached for it at least fifty times in twenty-one years, and the phrasing I settled on, and the good phrasing was mine, was: he got eight weeks into the only thing he ever said he wanted.
His mother had a photograph of him in the uniform on her sideboard until she died and would not take it down and would not talk about it, which says a thing of its own.
The version his brother does at Christmas has a line in it about a physical fitness test, which is not true and has never been true and which Lane has never once corrected. He sits there. He passes the potatoes. One year Sawyer said, “That’s not even what happened, is it,” and Lane said, “Long time ago,” and that ended it.
I asked him about it maybe twice, early on, and got nothing. He said it was not for him. He said it in a way that closed a door, and my husband almost never closes a door, and I read that as shame, and I was proud of myself for reading it as shame instead of pushing.
I want the date in here, because I did not put the date together with anything until this year.
He came home from Helena in the last week of October, 2002.
The Yard
There is a trailer in our yard. Not the coffee trailer. A twenty-eight-foot travel trailer, a 1991, that Lane pulled in here in the spring of 2017 and put on blocks and got water to and started gutting.
He worked on it for about six weeks. He put in new floor in the back half and got the tank situation figured out and hauled the old cabinets to the dump.
Then in June of that year he came in one evening and said, in the way he says a thing when he has been carrying it around, “Once that trailer’s set, there’s somebody could stay in it.”
And I said, “Here we go.”
I said it flat and I said it fast and I said it with the sentence right behind it, and I remember that he did not answer me. He went to the sink. That is a thing he does when I have hit him and does not do at any other time, and I have seen him do it for twenty-one years and never once made a thing of it.
I did not ask who.
That sentence gets a line of its own. I did not ask who.
I went out there the next weekend to see what he had gotten done, because I did that, because I liked to have an accurate count. The back half of that floor was new plywood, squared and screwed down on twelve-inch centers, and the tank lines were run and capped, and there was a list on a piece of cardboard nailed inside the door frame in his handwriting with nine things on it and three of them crossed off.
The cardboard is still nailed in there. I read it in March of this year standing in the doorway of that trailer in my work clothes at six in the evening, and the fourth item down says rail by the step.
He never touched the trailer again. It has been out there eight years with a tarp over the roof vent and a wasp nest in the awning arm, and I have pointed at it. I pointed at it to my sister. I pointed at it to Sawyer. I said, that is your father, right there, out in the yard where anybody can see it.
Nine Ways to Glasgow
On the nineteenth of February this year my phone rang at twenty past three in the afternoon while I was pulling films for the Monday reads.
“Is this Dorrie Boyum?”
“It is.”
“Ma’am, this is Brookmere in Glasgow. We’ve got you down as the second contact for Aksel Kvamme and we can’t raise your husband.”
I stood there in that room with a folder in my hand.
“For who?”
There was a pause on that line I expect to be hearing when I am old. Then the woman said, “Aksel Kvamme. Your husband’s the responsible party. He’s been on the paperwork since 2005.”
I said I would find Lane. She said Aksel had gone down in the hall that morning and they had him at the hospital there and it was a hip, and that they always call Lane first and he always answers, and that was the part that got me, the way she said he always answers, like I would know.
Lane was on a fence line out past Fallon with no service. I got him at seven. He said, “Which hip,” and then he said, “Okay,” and then he got his coat.
“I’m coming,” I said.
He stopped in the doorway with his coat half on and took a while about it.
“All right,” he said.
We stopped for gas at Circle at half past eight and he got out and washed the windshield on both sides, which took him a while because it was February, and I sat in the cab and watched him at it, and it came over me that he had done that on that same square of concrete a great many times and I did not yet know how many.
It is three hours to Glasgow if you go the way most people go. Lane did not go that way. He went up through Circle and cut over on a gravel road I have never been on in my life, past a place he called the Rindal corner, and he drove it in the dark at fifty-five without looking at anything, and about an hour in he said, “There’s nine ways to Glasgow and this one’s best when it’s froze. It’s no good in April.”
I sat in that truck and did the arithmetic and could not make it come out to anything I could hold.
Aksel
Aksel Kvamme is ninety-one and has been at Brookmere since 2005 and he has no children and never had any.
He ran a fence and welding outfit out of Nashua for forty years. Lane went to work for him at seventeen, the summer after Lane’s father went off, and stayed until he was twenty-three, and everything my husband knows about a corner brace came off that man.
Aksel had a stroke in the fall of 2002.
I sat in a chair in that room in Glasgow at eleven o’clock at night while my husband cut up a piece of pie somebody had left and fed it to a ninety-one-year-old man with a hip fracture, and I did the date in my head about six times.
The room had a window on the parking lot and a recliner and a corkboard with nothing on it but a calendar from a feed store in Nashua three years out of date, and a photograph of a welding shop with a man standing in front of it in about 1978.
Lane sat on the edge of the bed and got the tray arranged and did not talk much. He asked about the hip and he asked who had come in the ambulance and he asked whether the physical therapy girl was still the one from Hinsdale, and Aksel answered about half of it and drifted on the rest, and Lane carried on as though every answer had come back whole.
“You got the fence in at that place,” Aksel said at one point.
“Which place.”
“The one with the gate.”
“I did,” Lane said. “It held all winter.”
There is no such place. I asked about it in the truck. He said the gate had been gone six years and that it did not matter what he answered, only that he answered.
Aksel called me Lorna.
He said it twice, warmly, and Lane did not correct him either time, and I have not settled whether that was the eight years of decline or whether Aksel Kvamme never in his life knew that there was a second wife, and I will not be asking my husband which it is because I do not want the answer that is available.
They keep a book at the front desk. You sign in and put the date and who you are there to see, and they start a new one when it fills, and there are five of them in a drawer behind that desk going back to 2005.
I asked the woman on nights if I could look.
She got the drawer open and set them on the counter in a stack and went back to her charting and left me with them, which I have gone back over since. She did not ask why the wife of the responsible party wanted to see twenty years of a sign-in book at midnight.
The first one starts in November of 2005. The paper has gone the color paper goes. There are other names in there, dozens of them, in the early books especially, and then fewer, and then in the last two books there are stretches of eight and ten pages where there is one hand and no other.
Two hundred and fifty-one times, in the same hand, in ballpoint, Lane Boyum, and the line beside it that says relationship, and in every one of those two hundred and fifty-one lines my husband had written friend.
Two Hundred and Fifty Drives
I called Lorna in March.
I had not spoken to that woman since the cars outside the funeral home in 2014 and I got her number off a cousin and I called her at her house in Havre and told her who I was and she said, “I know who you are, Dorrie.”
I told her about Brookmere. She was quiet on that line a long time.
“That’s about right,” she said.
I asked her what had made her say that to me at that funeral, and she did not get defensive about it, and she did not take it back either.
“Because it was true and it wasn’t the whole thing,” she said. “It took me about fifteen years after I left him to work out the rest of it, and by then it wasn’t mine to tell anybody.”
Then she said four letters at me on the phone, and she said them the way a person says something they have said before to somebody who could not hear it yet.
She also told me, before she got off, that Aksel had come to their wedding in 1994 and had brought a welded weather vane he made himself and that it had a heron on it, and that she still has it, and that if I wanted it she would put it in the mail.
I did not say much back to her. What I wanted to ask, and did not, was whether she had known about Aksel the whole six years she was married to him, and whether she had said the sentence to me at that funeral knowing it, and I have been around that one about forty times without getting it to sit still. She was decent to me at those cars. She was decent to me on the phone. Both of those things are also true of a person who is telling you three-quarters of something.
I read for about three weeks after that.
In my work one film is not a finding. Nobody calls anything off a single image. You pull the prior study and you hang them together, and the slow thing is not in either picture, it is in the difference between them, and a person who has only ever seen the one film will tell you with a straight face that there is nothing there. So the first thing I went looking for was whether anybody had ever pulled a prior on this.
There is one such study and only one. Sittings a month apart, a bit past four hundred subjects. Around two thirds still held every letter at the second reading. The rest lost one, and the rest came to better than a quarter. What sits under any letter is a sliding measure, and it is steadier than the letter for the plain reason that the letter is that measure chopped at an agreed spot, so whoever stands near the chop reads one way in February and another in March. Nothing gets found with a tool like that. It describes. I have handed a radiologist a picture ten thousand times and let him tell me what it showed, and I decided I could let a description tell me where to look.
Four letters, and back of them a rank of mental habits from top to bottom, the first of them turning every hour a person is awake and the last one never really coming up to temperature. The way that rank falls in this type, and what the last of them charges a man across a lifetime, is worked through under the type itself.
What runs at the top goes out at what a thing could still turn into. Not at what it is. Beginnings are where that is thickest, so beginnings are where a man built like this lights up, and Lorna was right and I was right and everybody at every table was right. It is the only true thing anybody around here has ever said about my husband.
Beneath that sits a private measure of what is worth something. It does not publish, it does not argue, and nothing outside the man is required to keep it running. No contract, no announcement, no schedule on a wall, nothing anybody needs telling about.
Which means a thing held by that second habit has no events in it at all.
I stood at the light box at work three days later pulling a comparison series on a woman’s shoulder, 2011 and 2016 and now, and it came over me in that order.
October of 2002. He came home from Helena in the last week of it and Aksel Kvamme had a stroke that fall and there was nobody. No children. No wife by then. Nobody. And my husband was thirty-one and eight weeks into the only thing he ever said he wanted, and he came home, and he let his mother and his brother and eventually his wife say the thing about him for twenty-three years and never once put the two facts next to each other for anybody.
The trailer in the yard. Twenty-eight feet, on blocks, new floor in the back half. Once that trailer’s set, there’s somebody could stay in it. He was going to bring that man three hours south into our yard, and he could not get the sentence out any straighter than that, and I said here we go inside half a second, and I did not ask who, and he went to the sink, and he has driven to Glasgow two hundred and fifty-one times since.
And every foot is paid for. Nineteen ninety-eight, no payment on anything, six pieces over fourteen years, a man who has never carried a note in his life. There is nothing odd about it. It is the only shape a promise can take in a man like this, because a note is somebody else’s structure and what he holds he holds on his own measure, and I lived inside the most consistent thing that man ever did and called it not having a couch.
He has a fair amount of company. Off the 1998 sample, three thousand and some nationally, this type turns up in roughly one man out of sixteen, which in a county the size of this one figures to a couple hundred, and I would guess most of them are the most interesting man in somebody’s bar.
One more thing came up off that light box and I will set it down even though it does nobody any good.
Nineteen ninety-four, the wedding, the weather vane with the heron on it. Aksel Kvamme drove down out of Nashua and stood in a church in Havre for a woman he did not know because a boy who had worked for him at seventeen was getting married. That was thirty-one years ago and he made the thing himself out of scrap and Lorna still has it on a wall in Havre.
Nobody made me one.
I know how that reads. I have put it in because it went through me at the light box like a wire and because I have failed to stop it being true.
I did not tell Lane any of that. I went home and made supper.
What the Log Does Not Say
I was not fit to be around for most of the spring.
The anger did not have anywhere to go, so it went at him. In April I asked him why in God’s name he had never told me, in a tone, at the table, and Lane looked down at his plate a second and then said, “Dorrie, I did tell you. In the yard.” I said that told nobody anything, and he said, “No. It didn’t,” and got up.
That is as close to a fight as we have ever come and he took the losing end of it, and he was more right than I was.
In May I said the other thing, which I am putting down because it happened. I said that if he had brought that man here in 2017 I would have been the one taking care of him, seeing as I am the one who is here, and nobody ever asks the person who is here. And that is also true. Neither one of those helps and both of them hold, and my husband stood in the kitchen and said, “I know it,” and that was all, and I would rather he had thrown something.
Here is the part that had better be right, since a thing written this way gets taken up by people who need it saying what it does not say. A man forever starting things may have a private measure in him that never publishes. He may also be a man who starts things and hands the finishing to his wife, and from the driveway you cannot tell them apart. My test is this, and I am under no illusions about it. Look for the thing that never stopped. Not the thing he talks about. The one with no events in it, that ran twenty years without an audience and without you carrying one pound of it. If there is one, you have a reading problem and reading problems can be worked. If everything he has ever begun got finished by somebody else or set down on somebody else, then that is the whole picture and there is no prior to pull, and four letters have nothing at all to offer, and I would run off whoever was handing them to you.
Two of these have not been settled.
I do not know whether Aksel Kvamme knew I existed. I have decided not to find out and I know precisely what that decision is protecting.
And whether Lane heard me at that graduation supper is beyond me. He laughed. He always laughs. His face has run back through me a thousand times since March and it will not tell me anything, and Sawyer, who was seventeen and sitting across from him, says she does not remember the evening at all.
He goes out and stands in the wind. He has done it as long as I have known him. When it is blowing forty out of the northwest at ten o’clock at night he will put on a coat and walk up to the top of the coulee and stand up there in it for half an hour and come back in and not say anything about it. He does not want company. He is not upset. I have asked him and he has never had a word to give me about it and nothing I read this spring has anything to say about it either.
In April I went with him again.
That book at the front desk at Brookmere has a column for the time in and a column for the time out and a line for who you came to see, and it does not have anything else on it. It does not say that a man drove three hours in the dark. It does not say what got said in the room or whether anything did. Two hundred and fifty-one lines and every one of them tells you nothing at all, which is what I have been looking at for twenty-one years and calling nothing at all.
We came out at nine and it was starting to snow, which it does up there in April.
“Which way are we going,” I said.
He stood with a hand on the door and looked off north a second like there was something up there to see.
“Depends what it’s doing at Vandalia,” he said.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.