He takes the other side the way a man puts pressure behind a valve, to find out what leaks. The finding out is the whole of the procedure. Reading the result out loud to his wife is a thing nobody ever built into him.
The plant at Calvert put out its notice in February and by the first of March everybody in three counties knew that the unit which pays my husband’s bills is coming down in 2027, and I sat him at our own table and asked him a question with two possible answers.
“Do we sell the shop or do we not sell the shop.”
Trace had a bowl of soup and the paper folded to the obituaries.
“Well,” he said, “if you sell it now you’re selling into a scare and Bostick would take it off you at forty cents. If you hold it, the outage work don’t go away, it just goes across the river, and somebody’s got to do it, and there’s not another shop this side of the river with a lapping machine that works.”
“So we hold it.”
“I didn’t say hold it. You hold it, you’re a man of fifty-eight running a shop for a customer that’s leaving, and the day they haul the last unit out of there your building’s worth the block it’s made out of.”
“Trace.”
“Both of those are true,” he said, and ate his soup.
Twenty-two years. I have asked that man to tell me what he thinks about jury duty, about my sister, about whether our roof would go another winter, about whether he was happy, and I have gotten, every single time, a beautiful and complete accounting of both sides and no answer, and by about year six I had built the sentence I would use on him for the rest of my life.
Ask him twice and you’ll get both answers. That’s how you know there’s nobody home.
Trace Hoback has run the valve shop at Tiline since Wardlaw died in 2004. Gate valves, globe valves, check valves, mostly off the chemical complex at Calvert and some off the station. He reads three newspapers. He will talk to anybody about anything for as long as they can stand there, and men in this county like him enormously and do not ask him for advice.
I abstract titles at the courthouse in Smithland and have for twenty-six years, which means my whole working life is spent establishing what is actually so about a piece of ground and being able to show where it is written down. Deed books, mortgage books, the probate drawer, the tax rolls when the rest of it fails. A chain has to close. A chain that will not close gets said so in the certificate, and somebody’s closing gets moved.
It is not lost on me who I married.
Does It Seat
A valve is a hole with a lid on it. Everything else is detail.
The part that matters is where the lid comes down, which is the seat, and after twenty or thirty years of somebody’s steam and somebody’s slurry going through it the seat is not round anymore and it is not flat anymore and the valve leaks by. So it comes off the line and it comes to Trace, and he takes it apart and he laps it, which means grinding the disc against the seat with a compound until the two of them agree.
Then he blues it. He puts a smear of that dark blue paste on the seat and sets the disc down on it and turns it a quarter and lifts it off and looks at the ring it left. Full ring all the way around, unbroken, and you have got something. A break anywhere in it and you do not.
Then it goes on the test bench and he puts pressure behind it and counts.
In April he had a six-inch gate off the station that had been in service since 1991, and I was out there because I had his lunch, and he had the disc in his hand under the lamp.
“That’s a good ring.”
“It’s a good ring on three-quarters of it.” He turned it toward me and put his thumbnail at a place where the blue went thin for about an inch and then came back. “Right in there.”
“That’s an inch.”
“That’s the whole valve.”
He lapped it another twenty minutes with the machine running and blued it over and got a full ring, and then he set it on the bench and pressured it up and stood over it with both hands on his knees, counting, for two minutes by the clock on the wall. Then he wrote tight in the binder in pencil and put it on the pallet with the others.
Over the twenty-two years I have stood in that building perhaps two hundred times, and I have heard one question asked in it.
“Does it seat?”
Not do you think it seats. Not make a case for it seating. Tull Bostick worked in that shop eleven years and I never once heard him answer it with a sentence longer than three words.
Wardlaw kept a binder. It is a black three-ring binder from probably 1978 with a strip of masking tape on the spine, and every valve that has come through that building since is a line in it: date, tag number, what was wrong with it, what was done, and then a column at the right that is either a number of drops or the word tight. Wardlaw could tell you what plant a valve had come off by the smell of the packing when he pulled it, and would do it as a bar trick at the shop with his eyes shut, and was right more than he was wrong. Trace cannot do it and has never pretended he could.
Wardlaw filled about two-thirds of it. Trace has been working on the last third for twenty-two years and he writes in it in pencil and there is not one adjective anywhere in that book in his hand.
I used to think the binder was the tidiest thing about him and had nothing to do with the rest.
What They Call Him
The word on my husband in this county is that he can talk.
It gets said with affection. He ought to have gone into law, he ought to have had a radio show, get Trace started and you will not get out of there before ten. At Verdis’s daughter’s wedding a man I had never met stood beside me during the toasts and said, “Your husband could argue a dog off a meat wagon,” and laughed, and I laughed.
That same night a woman at our table said her boy was thinking about the Marines and there was a whole conversation about it that went most of a half hour, and it went around that table twice, and it never got to my husband, and he sat there eating cake and did not put a word in and nobody thought to ask him.
Then when it was over he leaned toward me and said, “That woman’s boy shouldn’t go in. She’s got two years left on that house.”
“Say that out loud.”
“They didn’t ask me.”
What sits inside all of that, and it was a long while before I heard it, is that not one person in Livingston County has ever brought Trace Hoback a decision. They bring him a valve. They bring him a story they want made funnier. Nobody in twenty-two years has sat down with my husband and said what do you think I ought to do, and I include myself, and I did it for longer than anybody.
There is a woman two counties over who does the same thing at a table and I have met her twice, and what that county says about her is a different word said in a different tone, and it costs her something other than what this costs him, and that account is hers and not mine.
The Bit About Wives
He does a bit about wives.
Any table, any occasion, five minutes long, and it is genuinely funny. It has a part in it where he explains that a wife is a person who asks you a question she has already answered and then grades you. It has a part about the thermostat. It has a callback at the end about a garage sale in 1998 that I have heard nine hundred times and that gets a laugh in this county the way a hymn gets a response.
I have heard him open it about seventy times.
“Now a wife,” he will say, and put his fork down, which is part of it, “a wife is a person who asks you a question she has already answered. And then grades you.”
Somebody at the table says something and he takes it.
“No, I’ll tell you how it works. She says do you want to go to your brother’s. That is not a question. That is a hearing. And you have got one witness and it’s you.”
Then the thermostat, then a stretch in the middle about a coat, then the garage sale in 1998, and it lands every time.
I laughed at it for years and then I quit laughing and he did not notice for a while, and then he did notice and did not stop doing it, and we have never once discussed that.
Here is what I want in about that bit, because that is the place the whole thing turned on me, and at the time I had no idea.
He does the bit with me at the table. He has never once run it about me in a room I was out of. Not one time. Verdis has told me that, and Erlene Gattis has told me that, and it has been confirmed to me by people with no reason to make my husband look good. Twenty-two years of the funniest man in three counties, in a county where a certain kind of man will do a whole set on his wife at a fish fry, and my name does not come out of his mouth in a room I am not standing in.
I had that fact for a decade and did nothing with it, because I had my sentence and my sentence explained everything, and a fact that does not fit a good sentence is very easy to set down somewhere and walk off from.
What I Said at the Gattis Table
The Gattises do a supper the second Sunday and there are usually fourteen or sixteen people in that house.
In November of 2016 Tull Bostick was there with his mother. He was twenty-six that fall and had been out in that shop with Trace since fifteen, summers first and then full, and he was better with a lapping machine at twenty-four than most men get, and the plant had offered him instrument work with a pension attached.
Tull had asked Trace about it. I know he had, because I was in the office when he did it, and I had a deed book across my knees and listened to my husband go for fifty minutes.
He gave that boy the pension and the health card and what a plant does to a man at fifty-five when the unit comes down. He gave him the shop and what a shop is worth and what it is worth when you are the only one in it who can do the work. He gave him his own father’s opinion and then he gave him the opposite of his own father’s opinion.
At about the forty-minute mark Tull said, “Which one, though.”
“Both of them have got a hole in them.”
“Yeah, but if it was you.”
“It ain’t me,” Trace said. “That’s the trouble with me telling you.”
Tull sat there a minute with his cap in his hands. Then he said thanks and went on back out to the bench, and I heard the machine start up, and I sat on in that office thinking, in those words, there is nothing in there.
So at that table in November somebody said something about Tull’s decision and turned toward me, and I did the thing I do.
“Don’t ask Trace,” I said. “Ask him twice and you’ll get both answers. That’s how you know there’s nobody home.”
It got the laugh. I have a good ear for a room. Twenty-two years of material was mine, and in Livingston County the license to say a rough thing about Trace Hoback was mine alone, which amounted to a position of sorts, and I liked holding it.
Tull Bostick was down at the far end of that table holding a plate.
What He Actually Does
He took the plant job in January.
He is thirty-five now. He is on instruments at Calvert with the pension and the health card, and he is one of the ones going out in 2027 when the unit comes down, which is a thing nobody could have known in 2016 and which I have used on myself in both directions at two in the morning.
I saw him at the IGA in Salem in the spring, at the end of the bread aisle, with a little girl in the cart.
“Miss Erlene.”
“Tull Bostick. Is that yours?”
He said it was and we did that for a minute. Then he asked how Trace was and I said busy, and he stood there with his hand on the cart handle.
“Y’all still got the big lapping machine out there?”
I said we did.
“I figured.” He straightened the cart. “That’s a good machine.”
That is the entire conversation and I have carried it around for a year.
I have asked Tull twice whether he heard me at that table. Both times he has said he does not remember, in the same words, and I do not believe a word of it, and pressing a man about that is not something I get to do.
Now I will put down what my husband actually did, which I did not learn for seven years.
In the spring after Tull left, Trace drove to Paducah and sat with a man at a bank about a note. He had a figure worked out to buy the shop’s building out from under the lease and put Tull’s name on a paper as a partner at thirty percent, and he had gone so far as to have somebody price the insurance on it.
He said nothing about it to Tull. He said nothing about it to me. I found the loan application in the file cabinet in the office in 2023 when I was looking for the property tax on that building, and it was filled out in pencil, in his hand, and unsigned, and dated the fourth of April.
The Visitation
Verdis Hoback and my husband have not been right since 2011 and for fourteen years I put it down to drift, the way brothers do, and being irritated that Trace would not explain it and would only tell me two reasons it might have happened and one reason it might not have.
Their mother died in August. The visitation was at the funeral home in Salem and it went five hours and I was standing at the coffee urn about eight o’clock when Rayford Sutton came over.
Rayford is eighty and worked with their father at the quarry office and does not talk unless he has decided to. He had on a suit that fit him in about 1988 and he had been standing at the end of that room by himself for two hours, which is a thing men his age do at a visitation. He got a cup he did not want so he would have something to hold.
“You know what he done for you,” he said.
“Who.”
“Trace. In the yard at your mother-in-law’s, the Fourth of July, the year they put the new roof on.”
I told him I had no idea what he was talking about.
Rayford looked at the urn for a while. Then he said, “Verdis got to talking about how you’d took Trace out of the shop and put him in the courthouse and how you’d have him in a necktie inside a year. Made a whole thing of it. Had a few. Said you married him for what Wardlaw left him.”
“And Trace argued with him.”
“No,” Rayford said. “That’s what I’m telling you. Trace never argued a word of it. He said no and he set his cup down and he went and got in the truck. And Verdis went at him about it two, three more times that summer, and every time Trace said the same thing and got up.”
He said, “You ever seen him do that? Not take a side?”
And I stood there in a funeral home holding a foam cup, understanding that I never had. Not one occasion in all that time. I have watched that man take the other side on the interstate, on his own father, on God, of whether Wardlaw was any good at this, of whether he himself should have quit in 1999. There is nothing that man will not turn over and hold up to the light.
Except one thing, apparently. And he had never told me it existed.
Wardlaw’s Binder
The abstract company got bought in 2024 by an outfit out of Memphis and in October they sent a woman down to do what she called a team profile, which was two hours in the meeting room at Smithland with a photocopied questionnaire.
I resented all of it. But I am a person who reads what is put in front of her, and when I got to the end there were four letters for me and a paragraph, and the paragraph was not wrong.
I filled one out for Trace in the parking lot with the heater running, out of pure spite, and the letters came back ENTP and I sat there a while.
In my work, saying a thing does not make it so. Recording makes it so, and it holds up only as long as somebody can go back into the book and find the same thing again in the same hand. An unrecorded deed amounts to a story about a deed. So the first thing I did, that week, at my own desk, was go and see whether anybody had ever gone back into the book on this.
Somebody had, one time. Two sittings a month apart, a shade over four hundred people. Roughly two in three still had every letter standing at the second go, and something past one in four turned up with a letter moved inside those weeks. There is a sliding measure under each letter that holds together far better than the letter itself does, since the letter is that measure with a line ruled through it, and whoever is sitting near the rule reads one way in October and the other in November. So this was no instrument of record. It was a description. A description will sometimes tell you where to go look, and I decided to go look.
I am going to put one thing in here that bears on my marriage not at all.
In 2018 I ran a chain on a forty-acre piece up on the Burna road and found that in June of 1937 a man deeded that ground to one son and then, the same afternoon, at the same desk, deeded it to another son, and both instruments got recorded, one behind the other, in the same book, in the same clerk’s hand. Nobody has ever brought it up. That family has farmed around the seam in it for eighty-eight years and there are people alive in this county today who own something they may not own. I have never told a soul which forty it is and I never will. I think about it about once a week and it has no bearing on anything.
Four letters, standing in for a stack of mental habits that comes in a fixed order, the top of it turning over whether the man wants it turning or not, the bottom of it wanting a crank every single time. The whole of that stack for this particular type, plus the business the bottom of it never gets around to, gets its own accounting under the type itself.
The top one manufactures the other side. Set any statement down in front of it and out come the versions of that statement nobody in the room has said yet, and it does this without being asked and cannot be shut off, and a man who has it will do it to a weather forecast.
The one under it is a bench of his own. Everything the first one throws up gets set on it and pressure put behind it to see what leaks. That is the procedure, start to finish. Not decoration and not a performance. It is how the man finds out what is so.
And the third thing, which is not a habit but the hole where a habit ought to be, is that nothing in that stack has any interest whatsoever in announcing the result. The announcing is somebody else’s job in a mind like that. There is no gear in there that turns a finding into a sentence and says it out loud to a wife at a table.
I sat at my desk in a county record room and things went over in an order I did not pick.
The bit about wives, which he has never once done without me in the chair. He had that settled before I ever met him and has not mentioned it to a living person since, because it was settled, and a settled thing holds no interest.
Fourth of July, the year of the roof. Rayford asked me if I had ever seen him not take a side. That is what it looks like when a question has been through the bench and come out and closed. There was no other side to run at, so he did not run at one, and he said no and set the cup down.
And the loan application in the file cabinet, in pencil, unsigned, dated the fourth of April. He had the figure. He had priced the insurance. Nothing about that page is indecision or a whim. It is a man who had finished the work and then had no way on this earth to walk out to a bench and say it to a twenty-six-year-old.
He is a thin population. The 1998 national sample of a bit past three thousand puts this type at something over four men in a hundred and a little past two women in a hundred, which in this county figures to maybe two hundred men, and I would guess every last one gets called funny.
The woman from Memphis came back through in December and asked whether anybody had found their profile useful.
“It was all right,” I said.
She wrote something down.
Does It Seat
I was not decent about any of it for most of a year.
What came of it was a year of being angry at a man over a thing he had no idea he had done, which is the least workable kind of anger there is. In January I told him that living with him was like being married to a hung jury. I said it in the kitchen with my coat still on, having driven home from Smithland thinking about it the whole way, and he glanced up off the paper and said that was a good line and that a hung jury at least deliberates, and I stood there and could not tell whether I had been agreed with or corrected or handled, and that is the condition and it does not let up. In February I got out the bit about wives and gave him the whole five minutes back, in his voice, at our table, with nobody there but the two of us, and I did the garage sale callback and everything, and Trace sat and listened to all of it and then said, “That’s pretty good.”
I could not tell you to this day whether that was him being decent or him being unable to be anything else, and the not being able to tell is the entire condition.
I told him about the Gattis table in March. I told him what I had said and that I thought it went into that boy. And my husband, God help him, gave me both sides of it. He said Tull would have taken the plant job regardless because of the health card and his mother’s situation. Then he said he could see how a thing like that lands on a young man from the wife of the man he works for. Then he said either one of those could be the case.
I said, “Trace. Which one.”
And he sat there.
Now for the part that needs handling, since writing of this sort gets lifted by readers who require it to mean something else. Knowing why a man argues both sides does not settle whether he is finding something out or getting out of something, and there are men who will take any side precisely so that nothing can ever be pinned to them, and from the porch those two look the same. Here is the test I would give and it is a plain one. Ask for the result. Not the reasoning, the result. A number, a date, a yes. If the procedure is real it terminates: he will get there, late, badly worded, in a truck, six weeks after you asked, but it comes out. If asking for the result reliably produces one more side, then the sides are the point and there is nothing at the end of them, and four initials can do nothing whatever for you there, and I would keep them away from anybody trying to hand them over.
Two of these are not going to come clear and I have stopped waiting on them.
Whether Trace ever told Verdis why is beyond me. The two men who were in that yard are the two men who will not say, and their mother is dead, and Rayford is eighty. Verdis was at the visitation and he and Trace shook hands and talked about a truck.
Nor can I say whether the both-sides answer in March about Tull was the procedure running or my husband being gentle with me. I have asked him. He gave me both sides of that too. I am aware of how that sounds and I am telling you it is funny in this house about one day out of three.
He reads the obituaries in three papers every morning and he keeps them. Not clippings. In his head. He can tell you in June that a woman in Sturgis was survived by three grandchildren and a sister in Fredonia, He never knew the woman and has never set foot in Sturgis, and asking him why has gotten me nothing whatever, which out of Trace is as loud as it gets. He does not clip them and he does not talk about them and he does not seem to be sad about any of it. He simply has them, the way another man has the county roads.
In May I drove out to the shop at half past three in the afternoon, which I do not do.
He had a globe valve off the station in the vise with the bonnet off and he was blueing the seat, and I stood in the door until he looked up.
“Do you want to keep it,” I said. “Not what it’s worth. Not what Bostick would pay. Do you want it.”
He put the disc down on the seat and turned it a quarter and lifted it and held it under the light and looked at the ring it had left, and he looked at it a good while, and then he said, “Two more years. And I want Tull to have first refusal and I’ll go tell him myself.”
Then he set it down on the bench and said, “It seats.”
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.