An ISFJ man will hand you the whole room and keep nothing back for himself, and after a while the people in that room stop believing there is anybody in there to keep anything back for. I held that belief for eighteen years and I said it out loud in a place where it was worth money.
The summer before we married, his mother had both families in her kitchen over a question about the reception, and Doyle stood at the counter with his back to the room and washed cups that were already clean.
His mother wanted the fellowship hall. My mother wanted the pavilion at the lake, which was free and had a view and no kitchen.
“Doyle. Honey. You’ve got a preference.”
“Whatever y’all decide is fine with me.”
“That’s not what she asked you,” his sister said.
“I know it isn’t.” He set a cup in the rack and turned around and dried his hands and looked at the two mothers with something on his face I read at the time as pleading. “It’ll be a good day either way.”
We had it at the pavilion. It rained, and Doyle spent an hour of his own wedding carrying folding chairs under the shelter house two at a time, and at the end of it he had a good time, or he said he did, which for a long while I took to be the same statement.
My mother, who was fond of him, said on the drive home that I had gotten hold of an easy one. That was the second person that day to hand me the same idea about my husband, and I took it from both of them without checking a thing, which is not how I would treat one line of anybody’s testimony.
I called my sister that night from my mother’s phone and told her I was marrying a man with no wants of his own. I said it the way you say a thing you have just figured out and are pleased with. Charlene said, well, you could do worse, and I said I knew it, and that is the last time in twenty-eight years anyone questioned the sentence, including me.
Doyle Mabry was twenty-six then. He had been an ambulance attendant for the district since he was nineteen and he went to home health in 1996, which up here nobody could account for and several people took as a step down. He remembers what side of the bed a person likes the light on. He remembers the year you married and the name of the road you grew up on and which of your kids you do not get along with, and he does not bring any of it up unless it is useful to you. He carries a folding chair to whoever needs one before they know they need one. He has never in my hearing said the word want about himself in a declarative sentence, and I am going to have to come back to that, because it is not a figure of speech.
I am writing this in the middle of something. Two months ago Doyle asked me for a thing, plainly, with a number attached to it, the way a person asks for something they intend to get. I have not answered him. Everybody I have told about it tells me the same, which is that after all this time I ought to give him this one. None of them knows what the number is, and none of them knows what I did to him in 2009, and the second part will not go into a sentence without the long way around.
He put a printout on the table when he asked me, and the printout is still on the table, between the salt and the mail.
Two Voices at Two Twenty-Five
I have been the official reporter for this judicial district since 1997. What that means is that everything said out loud in that courtroom becomes a document, and I am the reason it does.
The machine on my stand has twenty-two keys and does not spell. You press combinations, and the combinations stand for sounds, and the software lays my sounds against a dictionary I have been building since I was twenty-two years old. To sit for the certificate you take down five minutes of straight prose at a hundred and eighty words a minute, five minutes of a judge’s charge to a jury at two hundred, and five minutes of question-and-answer testimony at two twenty-five, and you have to come out the far end ninety-five percent right.
Every reporter builds a dictionary. Mine has better than a hundred and forty thousand entries in it, and a great many of them are one-stroke shortcuts I made up at two in the morning for words this district happens to say a lot: right-of-way, methamphetamine, Slate, the surnames of three families who account for a startling share of our docket. It is the most personal document I own and nobody will ever read it.
Here is the part civilians never believe. At two twenty-five you are not listening. Listening is slower than the talking. What you are doing is taking sound off the top of the room and putting it through your hands before it has been anything, and if you start understanding a sentence you will lose the next one. I have taken down a man describing what he did to his own child and gone home and made supper, and the meaning of it caught up with me at ten that night, off the page, in my own kitchen. That is not coldness. It is the trade. The words get to me late and they get to me flat, and they get to me exactly.
When a judge says read that back, the room stops and turns around, and I say the words again in a voice with nothing on it, which is the rule, and which is also the only time all day that anybody looks at me.
Our courthouse went up in 1911 and has a clock that has read ten past three since before I started. Every so often somebody runs for commissioner on fixing it, and then they get in and see the estimate. There was a fight about the annex that ran from 2004 to 2008, which I took down all of, and the argument was never once about the annex; it was about the sycamore they would have to take out to build it, and the tree lost, and the annex has a stain down the north wall now that they cannot get rid of. Dub Alsup has bailiffed for three judges and brings tomatoes in a five-gallon bucket every summer and will not give one to the assessor.
The Two-Hour Turn
A bed-bound person gets turned every two hours. That is the whole schedule, and it does not care what else is going on in the house.
Doyle works for the hospice out of Salter and he is in six or seven houses a day, up hollows, down the Cutoff, out past the low-water bridge that closes on him twice a year. He bathes people. He washes hair in a basin. He does mouth care, which is a swab and a little water and is what a dying person notices last. He turns them, and he shifts a pillow under a hip a half inch and asks, and shifts it again. He reports to the nurse.
He keeps a clipboard in the truck with a line for every house on it: the dog’s name, which door, whether a porch light left on means come in or means knock. He knows the Chessers’ back door sticks in wet weather and that you lift while you turn it. He knew Wilma took her coffee light, and quit coffee in 2012, and still wanted a pot made in the house for the smell of it.
What he cannot do, at all, under any circumstances, is give a medicine. Not a pill, not a drop, not the liquid morphine in the little brown bottle in the door of the refrigerator that the family has been told how to use. He can say the nurse will be here at two. He can put the bottle in a daughter’s hand. That is the line and it does not bend for anybody.
In 2014 I went with him one time, on a bad-weather day when the road out to the Chessers’ was iffy and he wanted somebody in the truck. I sat in the front room with my coat on. Wilma Chesser was in a hospital bed where the dining table had been, and her son Ferrell was standing over by the window with his hands in his pockets, and at some point Ferrell asked Doyle to go on and give her the dose, because Ferrell could not do it and the nurse was an hour out.
“I can’t do that, Ferrell.”
“There’s nobody here but us.”
“I know it.” He was folding a towel. “I’ll call her and get her moving. You can give it and I’ll stand here with you while you do.”
Ferrell said something I will not repeat, about what kind of a man, and Doyle went and made the call and came back and stood there with him while he did it, and then washed Wilma’s hair, and we drove home, and he asked me whether I thought the low-water bridge would go under.
What They Call Him
Up here the word for Doyle is sweet. He has been sweet since he was about thirty. Women who have known him since school say it in front of him. There is a version with the head tilted that means something closer to poor thing, and a version at the funeral home that means saint, and I have been told I am lucky more times than I could count, always in a tone that has a small door in it, and behind the door is a question about how a woman ends up with one like that.
Nobody ever asked him what he wanted, is the thing, and I do not think that is an accident of manners. Sweet is a place you put a man so you can quit wondering about him. It is not cruelty. It is efficient. A room can only carry so many people who might turn out to have an interior.
The same tending in a woman gets a different treatment entirely, and it is not the reverse of this one. The room does not go looking for a word, because it never wondered. A woman doing exactly what Doyle does gets read as a woman doing what she likes, and the question of what she is owed for it does not come up, so she is not put anywhere, she is simply used. That reading has its own weather and its own piece, and it is not mine to write. Mine is the one where the room hands you a compliment instead of a question, and you take it, because it is a compliment, and you were raised to say thank you.
At Buell’s daughter’s rehearsal supper there were nine of us at a long table deciding out loud whether to move the whole business indoors on account of the forecast, and the question went around the table and went past Doyle. Not around him. Past him, the way your eye goes past a coat rack. He had checked the radar twice on the drive over and he had a view about it. I watched him price what it would cost to get the table’s attention back onto himself, and decide against spending it, and go find somebody a chair.
I sat next to him and was congratulated on my luck.
I said thank you for eighteen years.
Slate Bend
His grandfather built a camp on the Slate at a place called the Bend in 1951, out of block and scrap tin, one room and a porch, up on the gravel where the river takes the turn.
There was a table in it made out of a door, and a coffee can of hooks on a nail by the window, and high-water marks up the inside of the block in carpenter’s pencil with the years beside them, 1957 and 1982 and the bad one in 1993 that got most of the way to the ceiling.
Their mother died in the fall of 2009. There was the house in town, which was going to sell, and there was the camp, and there was Buell wanting his money out and Oleta living in Tulsa and not able to keep it up from there, and there was Doyle, who had the least money of the three of them.
We all sat in the dead woman’s front room. Buell said the taxes and the insurance and what a new roof would run. Oleta said she would go along with whatever, and then everybody looked at Doyle.
“Whatever’s easiest on you two,” he said. “I don’t need to own it.”
And I said the next part, and I have this one word for word, because I have been over it more times than I have been over anything in my life.
“He really doesn’t. He’s not sentimental about places. He hasn’t asked to go out there in years.”
Oleta looked at me for a second longer than she needed to.
Buell said, “Well, that settles it, then,” and it did. They listed it in the spring. A man from Rogers bought it for the frontage, pushed the block building into a pile, burned the tin, and put up a two-story with a boat garage under it. You can see it from the bridge, and that bridge is how we get anywhere, and I have driven it a thousand times since and have never once looked across to find out whether he looks.
That is the sentence I published. It went out in a room with three heirs and a legal pad in it, and it was believed, because I was the wife, and the wife is the witness with the best vantage. Everybody there took my word over his because my word had a subject and a verb in it and his had that whatever in front of it.
He drove me home from that meeting and asked whether I wanted to stop for gas.
In the Matter of Wilma Chesser
Wilma went on past every estimate anybody gave her, and by 2016 she could not sign her name, and Ferrell filed to be made her guardian, and Janelle Chesser flew in from Denton and objected, and it went to a hearing.
Doyle had been in that house three times a week for the last two of those years. Both sides wanted him.
Judge Standifer put it on the record before we started. He said the reporter is married to a witness, and asked counsel whether anybody had an objection, and Prather said no objection, and Janelle’s lawyer said none, and Standifer looked at me over his glasses and said, “You all right, Norene,” and I said yes, Judge, and that is in the transcript.
I had never once heard Doyle talk for longer than about two minutes.
He was on the stand for a little over forty.
There is a thing that happens in my hands when a witness finds his feet, which is that the strokes get shorter and cleaner and I quit dropping the small words. My hands went smooth for my husband. I did not decide that and I could not have stopped it.
He gave dates. He gave the year Wilma stopped knowing the calendar and the month she quit feeding herself and the difference between the two, which is a distinction nobody in that room had thought to make. He said which visits Ferrell was present for. He said which ones Janelle called during, and how long she stayed on, and that Wilma held the phone herself until the spring.
Prather went after him on cross the way you go after an aide, which is to say by counting his credentials out loud.
“You’re not a nurse.”
“No, sir.”
“You have no medical training beyond a certificate.”
“Seventy-five hours and sixteen of them hands-on, and then whatever I’ve learned since.”
“So when you tell this court what Wilma Chesser wanted, you’re telling us what you think she wanted.”
“I’m telling you what she said. She said it to me in her kitchen in 2013 and she said it again the week she quit talking, and both times she said it with her son out of the room, and I wrote the date on my sheet both times because I thought it might come to this.”
Prather stood there. Then he said, “You’ve been going out there on your own time. Weekends, holidays. Why would a man do that.”
“I wanted to.”
I have his voice going flat on the want, the way a man’s does when a word is carrying weight.
Prather sat down. Standifer called ten minutes and Doyle came off the stand and went out to the hall to see about Janelle, who had cried during the part about the phone calls, and he brought her a paper cup of water and then stood there asking the bailiff what he was going to do about the blight on his tomatoes.
My hands went on. That is the only thing I am sure of about the next stretch of that hearing. The record has all of it and I have none of it, and when I read it back that night at the table there were four pages I could not remember taking.
Standifer appointed Ferrell with Janelle on the accounting. Doyle went out to the truck and got in on the passenger side out of habit and then got out and went around.
Read That Back
The following spring I sat a two-day civil trial in Salter: a woman passed over for a branch manager’s job three times, suing over how they picked. The bank had used an instrument, one of the sixteen-box systems that go around the corporate world in cycles. They gave it to everybody in the region, and a consultant read the results and wrote the recommendations, and the plaintiff’s lawyer, a man named Kittredge out of Fayetteville, wanted the jury to see the whole apparatus.
Their expert was a Dr. Amrine and he was good on direct.
“Q. What do the letters stand for?
A. Habits of attention, in an order. The first is what a person runs on all day. The second is what they get out into the world with. Then it steps down, and on down again, to the one they can barely get at.
Q. Can two people share the first one and be nothing alike?
A. It happens constantly. Same first habit, different second, and they look like different species. One of them puts the world in order. The other puts the room in order, and by the room I mean the people standing in it. Families mistake those two for each other for thirty years at a stretch.
Q. Does that second one have a name?
A. Four letters, like all of them. ISFJ.”
The way the machine writes, a sound can go two ways. Fair and fare come off my hands identically, and I have spent my life resolving those from context, and there are still pairs in my dictionary I have to sit and look at. Same chord, two words, and the whole meaning of a page riding on which one I choose.
Amrine put a table up on the screen. In a sample taken across the country in 1998, with three thousand nine people in it, the commonest of the sixteen was that one, the one that runs on stored particulars and then spends itself on whoever is in the room. The order it runs in, from the top down, is on the type’s own page. It runs a little under one woman in five. Among men it runs about one in twelve.
Kittredge got up.
“Q. Your instrument was given to these employees one time.
A. Correct.
Q. Your only repeat-testing evidence covers a span of four weeks.
A. Four weeks, yes.
Q. Four hundred twenty-four people, across three studies.
A. That’s right.
Q. Sixty-five percent got the same letters the second time. Twenty-eight percent moved one of them. Six percent moved two.
A. Approximately.
Q. So better than one in three of your employees would come back a different label inside a month.
A. The underlying scales are considerably steadier than the labels are. The scales and the types are two different things.
Q. The label is what’s in my client’s file, Doctor.”
Amrine was honest about it, which cost him. The jury came back for the bank in under two hours, and the whole business went in a box in the basement, and the only thing that survived out of those two days is what happened to me at my own kitchen table at half past ten that night with the transcript open in front of me.
It came at me the way meaning always comes at me, late and out of the paper. The one that puts the room in order.
His mother’s kitchen went first. The two mothers, the cups already clean. He had not been pleading with us. He had been reading a room with two women in it who were each about to be told no by the other one, and he had the fellowship hall and the pavilion sorted by what it would cost each of them, and he took the cost onto himself because he was the only one in there who could carry it without anybody noticing.
Then the wedding chairs, which I had been handing people for twenty years as evidence of a man who cannot sit down.
Then Ferrell at the window, saying what kind of a man, and Doyle folding the towel. He had not been hiding behind the rule. He had been keeping a son from being the one who gave his mother the dose that was in the room when she died, and he stood there and let himself be called something in order to do it.
I did not get to Slate Bend that night. I want that on the page. I sat there with a transcript I had to certify in the morning and I took three things apart and put them back together and I stopped short of the one that mattered, and I went up, and Doyle was asleep with the light on and a paperback on his chest the way he is every night of his life.
The Bad Spring
I would like to tell you the page made me kinder. What it made me, first, was furious, and the direction of it was at him.
I came at him in the truck on the way back from Charlene’s. I said if he had wanted the camp he could have opened his mouth and said so like a man, that he had let a whole room decide against him and then spent seven years being sweet about it, and that I was not going to be married to somebody who made me guess and then billed me for guessing wrong.
He said, “You didn’t guess. You told them.”
I said the worst thing I have ever said to another person, and I am going to put it here, because I have been sitting on it for nine years and there is no version of this that is worth reading with it left out. I said, “Your mother spent her whole life waiting for you to want something, too, and you let her die waiting, and I got stuck with the bill for it.”
He pulled off at the church and sat there. Then he drove us home.
We went about five months on courtesy, which anybody who has done it can tell you is the worst arrangement available. He made supper on the nights he makes supper. I certified transcripts. Twice I stayed at Charlene’s and told her it was the trial calendar, and she knew better and let me have it. I quit going with him to anything. When people asked after him I said he was good, he was busy, they had him in six houses a day, and I could hear myself doing the thing this end of the county does, handing over a compliment so that nobody has to ask a question.
Oleta is bad about phones. She will not answer one and will not carry one, and she has mailed me a card every year since 1998, always about three weeks early, always with a gift card in it for a store we do not have. She came through in the fall of that year on her way to a funeral in Ozark and sat in my kitchen and I told her, because I had gotten to where I would tell anybody, that Doyle had never once said he wanted that camp.
Oleta stirred her coffee. She said, “He put a roof on it in 2007.”
I said he did not.
“He put a roof on it in 2007 and he put one on it in 1998 before that, and he paid for both of them, and he asked me not to tell Buell because Buell would have wanted to split it three ways and Buell didn’t have it.” She looked at me the way she looked at me in 2009. “You want to know what Doyle wants, don’t watch his mouth. Go find out what he’s been paying for.”
I have never gotten her to say whether she told Buell that in 2009. She says she does not remember. I think she remembers, and I think she stayed quiet because Tulsa is a long way from a camp on the Slate and she needed her share. Oleta says that is not what happened, and there we are.
There is one more that will not close, and it is not hers. I have asked Doyle twice whether he knew, sitting in that front room, that I was fixing to say it for him. The first time he said he did not recall. The second time he said, “I’d have said it myself if you hadn’t.” That is not an answer and I have not been given another one.
The Asking Price
The people who bought it are older now and the boat garage is more than they want. It went on the market in the spring for two hundred and ninety-five thousand dollars, which is what river frontage has done in sixteen years, and there is nothing of his grandfather left on it now but the gravel and the turn of the water.
Doyle came in and put the printout on the table and said he wanted to buy it, and that he had run the numbers, and that it would take the retirement and the house and both of us working past sixty-eight.
Then he said, “That’s what I want. You can say no.”
Two months.
About that transcript, since I have kept a page of it in my bag for nine years. It gave me a way to say a true thing I had watched for two decades without being able to name: that there is a kind of person whose seconds are all spent on the room, and that the shape of it is regular enough to be described. What it did not give me, and what nothing on that page comes anywhere near, is the arithmetic. I can now account for why he did not say. I cannot account for eighteen years of nobody asking him, and the description does not touch it, and I notice that having the description made me feel better about a debt that had not gone anywhere.
There is a use of this I would not stand for. A man who never says what he wants can also be running a household with it, and I have watched that marriage from the reporter’s stand: the silence that arrives as a verdict, the unbilled kindness that has to be paid back forever, the wife who has learned to read a face because the alternative is a week of politeness. That is a different animal from the one I have been describing, and the difference is not subtle to the person living inside it. What I go by, from the stand and from my own kitchen, is what comes back when you ask a direct question. If it comes back with a subject in it, even a slow one, even one you did not want, you have two people and a translation problem. If it comes back as weather, every time, for years, that is a way of running somebody, and no description of how a person is built ought to be laid over the top of it to make it look like character. The same goes for a wife. I can say it at all only because I have been the loud one in this house, and the loud one has her own version of the same trick.
He is out at the house that used to be the Chessers’ this afternoon. There is a man in that bed now with the same daughter trouble and a worse road, and Doyle has the back door figured out already.
When he comes in he will not bring it up. He has not brought it up once in two months, and I know what that silence is, and I have known him twenty-eight years, and I can read him.
He came in at six and hung his coat over the chair and asked whether I had eaten.
The printout is where he set it down, between the salt and the mail. I have had my answer ready for most of a month, and what I am doing, sitting here at this table, is waiting for him to ask me a second time.
The people in these essays are composites drawn from long observation. The theory is not.