Move Validation
Episode 2 of 3 of The Flag on Box 1181 by Gwen Tarrant
We mailed it back Thursday in the five o’clock dispatch, and Friday it came to me in my own tray, addressed to Howard R Kessler at 8812 Quarry Bend Road, which is a thing that happens in no other job.
The flag at 1181 was down. Somebody had lowered it since Tuesday, and the hinge had cracked a second time and left a red line of flakes along the bottom of the box like sawdust. I swept them out with my glove and put the validation letter in with the Record, a Tractor Supply flyer, and a statement from Harlow County Savings.
Saturday the box was empty. Monday the box was empty. Somebody takes that mail in every single day out there and always has.
On break I read the Record, because there is nothing else in the truck. August is when they run the county delinquent tax list, three weeks running, four columns of parcel numbers in type you need arms for. I read it the way anybody reads a phone book, which is for names. Kessler, H R, Quarry Bend Road, two years delinquent, courthouse steps the fourth Monday. It is the most ordinary bad news in this county. I deliver the paper to about nine people on that list.
“Somebody changed my uncle’s address and it wasn’t my uncle,” Merle Kessler said Monday at 3:15, holding the lobby door with his boot and his truck running at the curb.
“You’re saying he didn’t submit it,” Phyllis said.
“I’m saying he’s eighty-eight and he does things. Last spring he called the fire department out to look at the moon.” He laughed at that by himself for a second. “I’m not driving back out there twice.”
She slid the cancel form across. He printed 8812 QUARRY BEND RD without looking at it, fast, all the capitals flat on the line, and shoved it back.
“Who brings his mail in from the box?” she said.
“I do. Saturdays.”
“And the other six days?”
“He gets it himself. He’s not dead, ma’am.” He said ma’am like a man clipping a coupon. “Can you just hold it? Permanently.”
“Thirty days is the maximum. After that it comes back to us undeliverable and I have to do something with it.”
“Then do thirty days.”
I said it out loud to Ike in the parking lot that evening. Somebody in that house is not Howard Kessler. Ike said sure, or Howard Kessler is eighty-eight and confused, and the nephew is a tightwad who does not want to burn the gas. That was the better answer, and it covered everything I had, so I took it home with me and went to bed.
Tuesday the trust’s certified came, return receipt requested, and nobody came out when I honked. I filled out a 3849 and checked the box that says sign the back and I will leave it tomorrow, and I dropped the slip in with the catalogs.
Wednesday morning the slip was in the box for me. H KESSLER, drawn slow, the capitals climbing off the line to the right, the ballpoint pressed so hard the letters were legible on the back side. I put the certified letter in, scanned it, and logged the signature the way I have logged that signature every August since 2015.
There was also a parcel from a pharmacy in Springfield, twelve pounds, the kind of box that is mostly air and cardboard. It would not go in the box and it was not going to sit in the rain, so I drove up the gravel to the house.
The porch boards were swept. There was a folding chair on it, and a plastic tub of clothespins with an inch of rainwater standing in it, and a doorbell button with no wire behind it. I knocked.
Inside, a deadbolt turned. Not open. Over, then back.
“Leave it on the step.”
The voice came through the door low and even, and I could not have told you anything about it in a courtroom. I said I had a certified item to hand over. The voice said it was already signed for, which it was, because I had the slip in my pocket. So I had no reason in the world to stand there.
I set the box down and went back to the Jeep and finished the route, ninety-one boxes, dogs at four of them.
I did not ask who I was talking to.