No. 55
Win’s Angel to Stew King (Hat Box)
Dear Stewart,
Still Advent for God’s Sake Will You but Listen 1939
Returning to the wooden walkway at the train station, Win, your old domestic servant and so much more, maneuvered around the people who were connecting with their friends, squinting through the falling snow. She leaned here and there a bit and acted as if she too might connect with her party, but—perhaps too quickly—determined they were not coming. You know, it was beginning to become a habit with these two. She didn’t really want company. Because now, it was this old friend, Charles, that she wanted to hang out with anyway, who, when things were looking up as she felt they were now, he too acted as “victory organized!”
She knew it was wrong but did it anyway.
But how, specifically, could it not be okay, come on, this one last time, God won’t mind so much, for sentimentality, for release, for hope that one railway postal clerk, who might pick her up, open the door to her used car, secure her with a belt, get into the driver’s seat, and manage just fine that old inconsistent clutch, through the slick and ever-becoming-more-hazardous streets of the backside of Clinton.
Back near the tracks just now, the clank of a throwing switch or bolt action geared her attention back to the assignment of getting home in one piece. But she refused to go back the same way. No—a new mission, this new fling, ok, this indulgence, even greater than her safety, had already pushed her off into a nether place.
She got into her car. Drove home. Opened the door. Dropped her boots at the coat tree. But kept her coat and hat on. Walked straight to the back of the kitchen. The last of the moving boxes there stacked by the porch door. Just an hour ago she complained about said boxes. Now she—There it is! —bent deep to find it.
Buried within a larger box: that old hat box. The hat box that once held a large red hat with fruit on it, one that Stella bought for someone who died or was dead but gave the ugly brown hat box to Minnie, who claimed it back to life with a bright, new ribbon. She bought that ribbon at the old family store for Stewart’s first wedding and used the remnant to wrap around this ugly cardboard. A proper ribbon, the color of a robin’s egg.
She reached for a handkerchief from her coat pocket. Wiped her nose. Did not make time to blow.
Ok! So as if it was yet another “last” indulgence before yet another “this time” diet, she sat up like a bolt. Stared at her catch. A sense of righteous. A sense of proportion. But dead ending, nevertheless, she now balanced on her lap her mission. She did have a way with hats, after all…. She made the sign of the cross. “Bless us, O Lord, and these, thy gifts, which we are about to receive. From thy bounty, through Christ, our Lord. Amen.”
—Guardian
P.S. I, who, like Jonah, has been “From the midst of the nether world.” Yo, Stew, crab face: Answer the call.
2025 Copyright Christine Friesel
