Box 1181
Episode 1 of 3 of The Flag on Box 1181 by Gwen Tarrant
“They find these in a kitchen drawer from 2003 and mail them in like a lottery ticket,” Phyllis said, holding a change of address card up by one corner. “Rev six oh three. We have not stocked that form since my first marriage.”
“Key it anyway,” Ike said.
“I always key it anyway. And then I get to mail a letter to the address you just left, asking a house whether you really left it. Move validation. Your tax dollars.”
I was on my third tray and not listening hard. Eleven years I have cased Rural Route 2 out of Blanton, Missouri, four hundred twelve boxes, sixty-eight miles, Harlow County gravel most of the way. I run it in a 2012 Jeep Patriot with the driver’s seat pulled out so I can sit on the right and reach out the window.
Ike slid my tray down the ledge. “Pension envelope for Kessler.”
“First week of the month,” I said. “Like the tide.”
The Kessler place is box 1181, 8812 Quarry Bend Road, long gravel drive, metal gate that has never once been shut. In eleven years that box has taken mail every day and never sent one piece. Not a bill payment, not a birthday card, not one of those sweepstakes envelopes old men fill out at the kitchen table. In goes a check envelope from Ardmore Trust the first week of every month, the Blanton Record, seed catalogs, and once a year in August a certified letter from the trust with a green receipt card stapled on.
Merle Kessler, the nephew, walks their hold orders into the lobby himself, two weeks in March and two weeks in October, every year, printing fast and leaving my pen uncapped. Snowbird, he says. I have never pointed out that those are strange months to migrate in. His truck is alongside that box most Saturday mornings when I come through, and he has hung it back on its post twice since the plow took it, and he has never once freed that flag.
Alton Sowards repaints rural boxes for twenty dollars and Alton does not mask the flag arm, so half of Quarry Bend is painted shut. I keep a putty knife in the door pocket for the ones that want to signal me and can’t.
I got to 1181 at 10:40 with the tray on my knee.
The flag was up.
I sat with my foot on the brake longer than the route allows. Then I got out, which I do not do at that box, and the hinge let go of its paint with a small tearing sound and left red flakes on my glove.
One piece inside. A change of address card, the postage paid kind, no envelope, face up. I am allowed to read what a customer writes on the outside of an unsealed card. That is the whole job.
HOWARD R KESSLER, block capitals, drawn instead of written, every letter riding a little higher than the one before it as the line went right. Old address, RR 2 BOX 44, BLANTON MO. The county went to 911 addresses in 2004 and half those boxes still have the route numbers painted on them, so that was nothing. New address, 219 FOURTH ST, BLANTON MO. Individual, not family. Effective immediately.
Down in the corner, small: PS Form 3575, Rev 6/03.
I thought, somebody out there finally wants their mail somewhere else, and good for them. Howard Kessler is eighty-eight if he is a day, and men that age move in with family, and 219 Fourth Street is Merle Kessler’s house. I know that because I cased Route 1 for nine days when Wayne was out. Who moves where is not a carrier’s business. My business was that the flag was up.
I put it down. The paint cracked again going the other way.
“Rev six oh three,” Phyllis said, and looked at me over the glasses.
“I know.”
“Where did it come from?”
“1181. Quarry Bend.”
Ike stopped scanning. “The one that never sends.”
“The one that never sends.”
She turned the card over twice, which is what she does while she is deciding, and keyed it, because a change of address is a change of address and it is not her place to grade penmanship. Forwarding on the Kessler name would start Monday. All first class into town.
“He skipped the signature date,” she said. “I’ll date it received.”
“Merle files their holds,” I said. “He walks them in.”
“Then Merle can walk in and tell me it’s wrong.” She stamped the card and dropped it in the tray for the scanning center. “Anyway, my opinion doesn’t come into it. The system doesn’t take my word.”
“Meaning.”
“Meaning what I told you at six this morning, Cheryl. You submit a change of address, we confirm it in writing.” She said it like a joke she is tired of telling. “So nobody can use one to walk off with somebody else’s mail.”
I stood there with my hand on the ledge.
Eleven years that box had taken mail and sent none, and the one piece it finally sent was a request to be moved. Now the office would confirm it in writing.
We mailed a letter back to the house.