I got the sleeve free. Looked inside. And I had to walk out of that garage and stand in the yard a long while, because it was a roll of paper, and it was a list of names.
Adding machine tape, the narrow kind, rolled tight and rubber-banded. Forty-seven lines in my daddy’s block printing going back to 1983, and every line is a name, a date, and one word after it.
The word is either STILL or GONE.
My father hired men out of Kilby and Limestone and the county jail for forty years. One at a time. Never a word to anybody about where the man came from, and he paid the same rate he paid everybody else and never held it over a soul.
Thirty-one of those forty-seven say STILL.
At the top of that roll, above the first name, he wrote one thing, and he wrote it in 1983 when he was thirty-four years old.
Keeping this so I know the number. Nobody else needs to see it, especially not them. A man that gets a job because somebody felt sorry for him spends the rest of his life being that man, and I am not doing that to anybody.
That is why it was in the thermos. Not from Mama. From them. He carried it to the shop and home every day for forty years so that no man working on his floor could ever walk past a drawer and find his own name on a list.
Mama had come out into the yard by then. I gave her the roll and she read it standing up in the grass and then she said, well. Just well. Forty-two years married.
She had known about two of them. Two out of forty-seven.
I found nine of those men. It took me until October, mostly one of them handing me to the next one.
Curtis Ledbetter owns a transmission shop in Florence with four bays and six employees. He came to my daddy in 1991 at twenty-three with eleven months served and no license, and my father drove him to work for five months.
He hires the same way now. He did not know why he did until I sat in his office and read him that line off the tape.
We had a thing at the shop the second Saturday in November. I did not call it a memorial and did not put it in the paper. Nine men came, and four wives, and two of them had never told their own children where they got their start.
Nobody read the list out loud. I want that understood. They each looked at their own line and that was the whole ceremony.
The thermos is on my workbench with the sleeve back in it and the Delco sticker holding the cut shut, same as he had it.
Mama asked me once what he was keeping from her all those years. He was not keeping a thing from her. He was keeping it from forty-seven men who would have spent the rest of their lives knowing somebody wrote their name on a list, and he carried it in a coffee thermos so it would never be in a drawer.