He was not withholding the future from me. He had no idea it was inside him and not out on the table where everybody could see it, and by the time anybody explained that to me it had already cost a man his twenty years.
In the fall of 2003 I asked Garth whether my mother could come live with us, and he said give me till Thursday.
It was a Monday. I remember standing at the sink after he went out to the shop and running the water over a pan I had already washed.
Three days is not a long time and I would like to be fair about it. He did not go quiet on me and he was not cold in the house. Tuesday he asked how her knee was. Wednesday he brought home the good bread from Malad. But I had put a thing that was breaking my heart on a table in front of my husband and he had picked it up and taken it away to be worked on, and there is a particular kind of alone that is available to a woman in that position, and I got very good at it.
Thursday after supper he sat down across from me.
“Yes,” he said. “March, not now.”
“March.”
“The bathroom on this floor’s not right and I’m not carrying your mother up those stairs in January. I priced it out at Bunderson’s. A month, if we start after the first of the year.” He had a pencil and he was drawing the bathroom on the back of a route sheet. “There’s a grade at the side door. The county’ll let us take it out. Doctor Riggs said if she’s got somebody in the house at night he’ll write for the walker now instead of waiting.”
“You called Riggs.”
“Tuesday.”
I sat there and I cried, and Garth waited, because he thought I was relieved. And here is the thing I want in early, because it is the whole difficulty. He was right about the stairs. He was right about January. My mother had a good room on the main floor with a rail in the shower and she lived in it for five years and died in it in her sleep, and every single piece of that came off the back of a route sheet on a Thursday.
I told the story for years the way I am telling it now, and by 2008 or so I had it down to one line, which I would say to my sister on the phone and to the women at the co-op supper and eventually into a microphone.
I have been an agenda item since 1991.
Garth Wixom hauls milk. He started with one tank truck he bought at a sale in Burley, and he has not once asked a soul in this house to be interested in it, and he has never once described a thing he intended to do before he did it. He gets up at half past three. He does not drink. He remembers what you told him and he will bring it up nine months later when it has become useful, which people find flattering the first time. He will not fly. Has not, will not, will drive to Bismarck sooner than get on a plane, and has never given one reason for it, to me or to anyone else.
The Chart
There is a chart. I have to be careful here, since I have made it into a joke so many times that I have to work to remember it is an actual object.
It is a piece of graph paper from 1991 with a line on it, drawn with a ruler, going up. Underneath the line he wrote years, and above it he wrote numbers of trucks. It was on the wall of the first office, which was a room off the back of the shop with a space heater in it, and when they built the new office in 2005 he had it framed, and it hangs in the hallway to the driver’s room where every man who works there goes by it four times in a day.
The line ends at fifty. In 1991 he drew a line that ended at fifty trucks in the year 2015 and he did not tell one living soul, including me, that this was what he meant to do.
He got to fifty in 2013. He was two years early and I have never heard him mention it.
What he does mention, constantly, to everybody, is the question. What is your chart. He asks it of drivers. He asked it of a girl at a parts counter in Rupert who was maybe nineteen and had said something about school. He asked it of our son Boyd at the kitchen table when Boyd was fifteen, and Boyd said he didn’t have one, and Garth said all right and went back to his plate, and Boyd went a week without speaking to him over that all right, and I did not help.
For twenty-some years I understood the question as a test. That is how it lands. A man asks you what your chart is and what you hear is that you are being assessed against one, and that somewhere there is a version of you that is behind schedule.
Our daughter Nola was better at him than I was. She figured out at about fourteen that if you gave Garth a chart he would move heaven and earth for it, and she gave him one, and he paid for veterinary school without one word about the cost, and she is in Twin Falls now and calls him on Sundays. Boyd runs a crew for an outfit in Nevada and calls me.
Sixty-Two Trucks
Milk is measured in pounds, which is the first thing that throws people. A tanker carries around fifty thousand of them. It goes on the truck at under forty-five degrees and it has to stay there, and every farm tank on the route gets agitated and measured and sampled and written down before one drop moves, and the man doing it holds a state license to do that very thing and can lose it.
The whole business is a promise about time. A dairy’s tank fills whether anybody comes or not. The cows do not know about your transmission.
Sagehill sits between the Curlew and the Arbon side and Garth’s routes run out both, and in the 1990s he was hauling for nine farms and in 2013 he was hauling for a number I could not tell you and there were fifty trucks and now there are sixty-two. I did the books for the first three years and then he hired somebody who was better at it, which he told me by hiring her.
I taught piano in the front room the whole time. I still do. Thirty-one years, Tuesday through Friday, half hours, and if you want to know the truth about the difference between my husband and me it is that I have never once known which of those children was going to keep going. You cannot tell at seven. You cannot tell at eleven. There was a boy named Dax Openshaw who practiced six years, every day, badly, and got good the spring he was thirteen, actually good, and quit that June to work at his uncle’s, and his mother stood in my doorway and said she was sorry, and I said don’t be, and I have never gotten over it. Garth would say that is a bad system. It is not a system. It is the work.
Rey Cardenas has driven for Garth since 1993 and has the Curlew route and will not take another one. He has been offered the Arbon side twice, which is more miles and better money, and turned it down both times over a stretch of road east of the summit where the drifts come across at an angle, because he says he knows where that road sits under the snow and nobody else on the board does. In 2016 his daughter got married in Tremonton and we went. Rey had bought that girl a horse for a wedding present. An actual horse, at fifty-one years of age with a note on his house, and it was standing out front of the reception hall with a ribbon on its halter, and every man there thought it was the finest thing he had ever seen and every woman there was doing arithmetic. I think about that horse more than is reasonable. It bears on nothing else in here.
There is one thing out of those years that never fit anywhere, and it goes before the rest of this.
In 2009 a load came back positive at the plant. That happens when a farm treats a cow and puts her milk in the tank before the drug is out of her, and the plant tests every load at the door, and a load that comes back hot does not get unloaded. Fifty thousand pounds off six farms goes down the drain and the farm that did it pays for the whole thing. That is the rule everywhere and it was the rule then.
It was the Skidmore place. Delbert Skidmore had ninety cows and a son who had been treating and had not written it on the board. The bill was a little over twelve thousand dollars and Garth sent it, in full, on the regular billing cycle, with nothing in the envelope but the bill.
Del called the house. I answered, because Garth was out on the Arbon side.
“Iva. I’ve got a bill here.”
“I know it.”
“Twelve thousand and change. Off Garth.”
“I know it, Del.”
He did not raise his voice one time in that whole call, which was the worst of it. He wanted to know whether Garth had laid eyes on it before it went out, and I said Garth had written the figure himself, in pencil, at this table. There was a long piece of nothing on the line.
“Well,” he said. “Tell him I got it.”
I could not believe he did that. Del Skidmore was at our wedding. I said so, in this kitchen, and Garth said the co-op rules were the co-op rules and a hauler who eats one load eats them all, and I said that did not answer what I had asked him, and he said it was the only answer there was.
The Skidmores sold out in 2011. At the sale Del told a man standing next to me that Garth Wixom broke him, and I stood there and did not say a word, because I thought he was right.
The Word for Him
The co-op has an annual meeting in the hall at the fairgrounds in February with folding chairs and a ham, and in 2012 I sat through two hours of it next to a woman I did not know.
There was a fight that year about hauling assessments. A woman named Tolman, who had taken over her family’s dairy out past Rockland when her father died and had roughly tripled it, got up with nothing in her hand.
“The assessment’s built on tank size and it ought to be built on miles,” she said. “I’m nine road miles off the plant and I’m paying like I sit out at Holbrook. Fix the formula, or I’ll haul my own, and so will everybody on this side of the summit.”
Then she sat down. It took her under two minutes and she got it. Behind me a man said she would run right over you. Another one said something about how he would not want to work for her. There was a word after that which I will not set down here, but which this valley reserves for exactly one kind of woman and never has to explain.
An hour later Garth did nearly the same thing about a different line item, shorter, and afterward in the ham line I heard a man tell another man that Garth sees around corners, and that you want him on your side of a thing.
I have thought about that hour more than any other hour in this account. The valley had one word for her and a different word for him and it was the same behavior inside of forty-five minutes in the same room. What happens to the woman version of this is not my story to tell and it is a harder one.
But I mean to be honest about where I was sitting, because I was not sitting outside it. I went home that night and told Garth about the Tolman woman and I said she had a lot of nerve. I said it about a woman doing the thing I had married. I had one word for her and no word at all for what I was living inside of, and it would be six more years before anybody handed me one.
What I Did in 2014
Verl Halloran came on in 1996 hauling out of the Arbon side and by 2010 he was doing the routes, all of them, the whole board, and I want that understood, because he was not a dispatcher. He was the man who decided which fifty thousand pounds went where in weather. Garth quit doing it in 2008 and never touched it again, which for Garth is the single loudest statement available.
Verl was in this house probably twice a month for eighteen years. He ate here. He and his wife Kirsten went with us to Nola’s graduation.
In the summer of 2014 they were trying to decide about a house. There was a place in Sagehill they wanted and it was more than they had planned on, and it turned on whether Verl was going to be there in ten years or whether they should keep it cheap and stay loose. Kirsten had been after him to ask Garth straight out.
He asked me instead, at my kitchen table, on a Saturday in July, while Kirsten was out in the yard throwing a ball for our dog and losing.
He had come by for a hitch pin and had been in the house forty minutes. He turned his cup a quarter turn at a time on the table the whole while, which I had never seen him do, and then he put it down and left it alone.
“Has he ever said anything to you? About where he’s got me.”
And I told him the truth. I want that plain. I did not gossip about my husband and I was not being cruel. I told Verl Halloran what I honestly believed after twenty-three years of marriage, in the kindest voice I had, because I thought I was doing him a mercy.
“Verl, he is never going to say it. You’re a position to him. When the position changes he’ll tell you what it changed to, and not before, and if you wait on him to sit you down and say where you stand you will wait the rest of your life.”
He was quiet a minute. Then he said that was what he had figured, and thanked me, and they bought the cheaper house on the Malad road.
I have gone back into that kitchen ten thousand times. There is no version where I said something else. Every word of it fit everything I had.
The Folder on the Table
He quit on a Sunday in October of 2016. He came to the house, which is what a man does after twenty years, and I let him in and he stood in the front room with his cap in his hand and I sat down on the piano bench because there was nowhere else.
“I’ve took a job in Ogden,” he said. “Terminal manager. I start the fifth.”
Garth did not say anything for what I would put at eight or nine seconds. I have been in a room with that man for thirty-four years and I had never heard that silence.
“Doing what for them.”
“Their whole west side. Sixty-some drivers.”
“When did they come at you.”
“August.”
Garth said, “That’s not what I had.”
And Verl said, not angry, in the voice you use with somebody you like, “You never said what you had.”
My husband opened his mouth, and I watched him find nothing in there, and shut it. Verl waited a good while. Then he said he would work through the month and he put his cap on and went out, and I heard the truck, and Garth stood in the front room a minute and then went out to the shop and took the ten o’clock load himself, which he had not done since 2008, and got back at six in the morning.
I was up. I went out to the shop at five and sat in the yard truck with the heater running until his lights came up the road, and then I got in the cab with him for a while, which we had not done since the children were small. Neither of us said one thing worth writing down. He asked was there coffee. I said there was.
Three weeks later he put a folder on the kitchen table.
Inside it was a buy-in agreement, twenty-two pages, drawn up by a lawyer in Pocatello, with Verl Halloran’s name typed in it in nine places. Thirty percent over six years against wages, with a formula for the trucks. It was not a draft. It had been sitting in a drawer finished.
The date on it was August of 2014.
Six weeks after my kitchen table. And I sat with my hand flat on that folder and did the arithmetic on it three times to see if I could make it come out different.
“Why didn’t you give it to him.”
“It wasn’t ready.”
“Garth. It was written.”
“The Ogden lane wasn’t done,” he said. “You don’t hand a man thirty percent of a thing that isn’t finished. I had it at 2018.”
“Did you tell him 2018?”
And he looked at me with an expression I have thought about since and would describe as a man being asked why he did not announce the weather.
“He was in it,” he said. “He was in the whole thing.”
Halloran’s Workbook
In January, Kirsten Halloran brought me a box.
It was the stuff out of Verl’s desk at the shop and there were things in it of mine, a dish, a photograph from Nola’s graduation, and she did not want to bring the box to Garth. Underneath everything was a spiral workbook from a three-day supervisors’ course in Idaho Falls that the company had paid for in 2011.
I read other people’s handwriting for a living, in a way. A practice log will tell you which week a child stopped, not from what they wrote but from the pressure of the pencil, because a child writing down a lie about Wednesday presses differently. I sat on the floor with that workbook for two hours.
The back of it had one of those inventories. Verl had done his own and then, on the facing page, in the margin, he had run one on Garth off the questions, and written the letters out in the margin, ENTJ, and circled them, and put this is him under it, and then a date two years before he quit.
I typed the letters into my phone that night after Garth went up.
The letters stand for four habits of mind, ranked by how much weight a man puts on each, the top one carrying nearly the whole load and the last one barely turning over, and where this type’s habits sit in relation to each other, and what the bottom one costs him, gets its own article.
The top habit is the outside world put into working order. Systems, sequence, who does what by when, and a hard preference for a decision that is wrong over a decision that is late. Anybody in this valley can see that one on my husband from the parking lot.
It is the second one I had never been told about and would not have believed.
The second habit makes a picture. One picture, of the way a thing will run, arrived at without steps a person could show you, and it does not present itself to him as a guess. It comes in as a fact that has not happened yet. And because it is a fact, it does not occur to him to put it to anybody, any more than you would poll the room about what month it is.
That is the size of it, and it is the entire thing I did not have.
I sat on the floor of my front room and things started coming apart and reassembling and I could not stop them.
Thursday, 2003. He was not weighing whether my mother could come. He had gone and priced a bathroom and called a doctor, and the three days were construction, not deliberation, and the reason he did not say of course she can come on Monday night when I needed to hear it is that to him that part had never been a question and therefore was not information.
The chart on the hallway wall. He framed it. He hung it where sixty-two men go by it every working day, and I had been calling it a monument for a dozen years, and it is the only place in the whole world where he ever put the picture out where somebody could look at it, and not one of us ever asked him what the line meant.
And Del Skidmore.
I have wanted for sixteen years to be able to tell you that Garth did some quiet thing for those people and never mentioned it. He did not. What I understand now is smaller and worse than cruelty. In the picture, a hauler who eats one load has already quit being a hauler, and Del was going under on ninety cows no matter who hauled him, and Garth had known that since about 2006. So the bill was not a decision that got made in October of 2009. It had been made years earlier, somewhere Del could not reach and I could not reach, and the envelope was only the day it surfaced. I do not know yet what to do with that. Del is alive and living in Preston and I have not called him.
And what is your chart, which I had understood as a man ranking you, and Boyd had understood as a man ranking him. It is not a test. It is the only question he knows how to ask a person that means tell me the thing you are actually for. He asked a nineteen-year-old girl at a parts counter in Rupert. He asked his son at the supper table. He does not have another way to ask it and he has never in his life been told that this is not how it sounds.
There are not many of him. The best national numbers anybody has, from a sample of about three thousand people in 1998, put this type at somewhere around one man in forty and fewer than one woman in a hundred, and I would say from thirty-four years that being married to one is not a common experience and the advice that circulates for it is written for something else.
And I will say what the tool is worth, since I have leaned on it in these pages. It is a vocabulary and it is not a serial number. The only decent retest anybody has done gave four hundred and some people the same questions four weeks apart, and roughly two in three got all of them back the same, and in something over a quarter of them a letter had moved. The scales underneath hold up considerably better than the letters do. Four weeks is also the only window anybody has looked at. So it is a word for a thing I had watched for three decades without a word, and I would not build anything on it that I would not build on a word.
My three-thirty came and I was still on the floor with a spiral notebook. Her mother stood in the doorway with the car running out on the road.
“Everything all right in here?”
“I lost the time,” I said.
I did not tell Garth about the workbook for two years.
What Is Your Chart
The year after Verl left I was not good.
I was angry at Garth in a way that had no floor under it and I went at him about things that had no bearing on anything. In February I told him he had run his whole life like a man loading a truck and that he had loaded me on it in 1991 and never once opened the door to see what was back there. He said, “All right.” He says all right the way other men take a punch. In March I did not go to the co-op supper with him and I said it was my knee, and it was not my knee, and he did not ask a second time.
None of that reached the actual thing, because the actual thing was that I had been right for twenty-three years and being right had cost a man his life’s work, and there was nowhere to put that except onto the person who had made me right.
Verl Halloran runs a hundred and ten trucks in Ogden now and by any measure a person would use he is fine. That is the sentence I have used on myself for nine years and it does not hold, because he wanted this one, and he built this one, and he had thirty percent of it in a drawer in Pocatello for two years and nobody ever put it in his hand, and I am the one who told him to stop waiting.
Kirsten and I still talk. I have never told her either.
And there is Boyd, who is thirty-six and runs a crew for an outfit outside Elko and has not spent a night in this house since 2017. Boyd did not inherit my sentence. Boyd got something worse, which is that his father asked him at fifteen what his chart was, and meant tell me what you are for, and Boyd heard a man taking inventory, and I sat right there and let him hear it that way. I tried to tell him about the workbook on the phone in 2021. He said, “Yeah, Mom,” and asked about Nola’s kids, and I let him change it, and I have not tried again.
I need to say the hard part now, because an account like this can be picked up by the wrong hands. Understanding why my husband does not tell you where you stand does not give anybody back the years they spent not knowing. It is a real injury and the explanation is not a payment on it. A man can run on a picture and also be a man who has worked out that not telling you keeps the room his, and from the outside on a Tuesday those two look identical. Here is the one way I know to tell them apart. Say it to him straight: put the picture where I can see it. Not once, in a fight. Say it flat, on an ordinary day, and watch. If he starts trying, badly, in the wrong words, at the wrong times, then the trouble is one of translation, and those can be worked, and I would tell you it is worth the working. If asking makes you smaller in the house, if the not-knowing turns out to be load-bearing, then no set of letters has anything to say to you and nobody should be handing you any.
Two things I have not settled and do not expect to.
Garth says he would have given Verl the papers in 2018. I think he would have moved it to 2020, because the Ogden lane would not have been done, because it is never done. I have said this to him once. He said I was wrong. Neither of us has a way to prove it and one of us is living with a man who is right about most things.
He still will not fly. I went through that book looking for it and it is not in there. In 2018 he drove to a meeting outside Sacramento and back inside of three days rather than sit on a plane for two hours, and when I asked him in the truck he said there was not anything to tell. Whatever that is in my husband, I have looked for it on every page of this and it is not on one of them.
And there is the piano.
In 2019 a girl named Kimber Judd came fifteen minutes early on a Tuesday and stood in my kitchen and said, “Mrs. Wixom, somebody’s playing.” Garth was in the front room and he had been in the front room on Tuesdays before lessons for I do not know how long, and what he was playing was the first sixteen bars of a Chopin waltz, the easy one, the one every one of my children learns at eleven, and he was playing it very slowly and getting the left hand wrong in the same place twice.
He has never touched it in front of me. He knows I know. I have asked twice.
Last Sunday I was at the sink and I heard it come through the wall, four bars and a stop, and again, and again, and I stayed where I was with the water running over a pan I had already washed.
He came through afterward and told me he was going to Ogden on Wednesday and did I want to ride along and get supper.
I said play it for me first.
He stood there a second with his hand on the top of the chair.
“It’s not ready,” he said.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.