A letter from Papaw — Before light. Drawer pulled out and left that way.

Went into the drawer for a book of stamps and put my hand on my time card from the mill. Not the last one — one from the middle years, '84 or thereabouts, the ink faded almost through. Wendell's name isn't on it. He'd been gone six years by then. But I stood at the table holding it and it was him I was thinking about.

There was a stretch in '76 where he and I didn't speak for near four months. I'd said a thing to him — over nothing, over what somebody's wife had said about somebody else's truck, some fool thing — and I'd said it sharp. Meaner than I meant. I knew it when it left my mouth and I let it go anyway, because I was thirty-two and my pride was a bigger man than I was.

Four months. He worked the same line I worked. We passed each other on the floor and he looked at his feet and I looked at mine. April went by. May. In June I saw him across the parking lot after shift and I went the other way around the truck so I wouldn't have to nod. In July I was drafting the words in my head while I ran the machine and by the time I got home I couldn't remember what I meant to say. Every morning I put my boots on and told myself today, and every night I took them off and I hadn't.

What broke it was the gas station off the highway, the one out toward Marshall. I pulled in for fuel and there was his truck at the next pump. He was looking down into the bed at something. I filled the Ford and walked over and I said Wendell, I was wrong about that thing in April and I've been wrong every day since. He didn't say much. He said all right. We stood there another minute. Then he got in his truck and I got in mine and I drove home with the radio going in and out — the ballgame, then the gospel hour, then that stretch past the old quarry where it goes to static and stays there — and I couldn't have told you the score of the game or the name of the hymn. I was just driving.

Two years and some months. That's what I had left of him after that day at the pump. If I'd waited another week to say it I'd have had two years and some months minus a week, and I'd have carried that week the rest of my life.

Going to put the time card back and shut the drawer. The tires on the gravel'll be Earl here directly.