Route Fourteen
In the fall of 1988, when I was twelve, I had the morning paper route in the Wishkah River neighborhood of Aberdeen, Washington. Route Fourteen: sixty-two houses, five days a week and Sunday, which meant the fat Sunday paper and a wagon. I’d get up at 4:30 in the rain, fold the papers on the garage floor with rubber bands, put them in the canvas bag with the newspaper’s name on it, and bike the route in the dark. It paid about thirty dollars a week. I thought I was rich.
The route came with a card file. Every subscriber had an index card with their address, how they wanted the paper (porch, mailbox, behind the screen door), and a record of their payments. Most cards started in the seventies. One started in 1931.
1104 Cedar Bend. Daily & Sun. Inside storm door, face up. Pays Fri.
The card was soft and brown as a leaf. It had been copied over at least twice; the oldest part was in fountain pen. The payment column ran down both sides and onto a second card stapled behind it, in a dozen different handwritings. Every Friday since 1931, the same mark. Pd.
1104 Cedar Bend was at the end of the route, where the road ran out along the river into a stand of alder. It was a two-story house, shingled, gray with weather, with a sagging porch. The windows were dark and had been dark for as long as anyone remembered. The yard was blackberry. There was a county notice nailed to the door that said UNFIT FOR OCCUPANCY with a date in 1979.
The kid who had the route before me, Marcus Lindahl, showed me the stops. When we got to 1104 he got off his bike and walked the paper up to the porch himself, opened the storm door, and laid the paper inside it on the boards, face up, carefully, with the date showing. Then he closed the storm door and walked back.
“Somebody lives there?” I said.
“No,” he said. “But do it like that. Face up, so he can read the date.”
“So who can read the date?”
Marcus was fifteen and mostly communicated by shrugging. He shrugged.
On Friday there was an envelope on the porch rail. A small, old-fashioned envelope, the kind that doesn’t have a plastic window, thin and yellowed, held down with a stone. Inside were coins. The right amount for the week, to the penny, plus a dime for me, which nobody else ever gave. I tipped the coins into my hand under the porch light at the house next door and looked at them.
They were all from 1931. Every one. Wheat pennies, buffalo nickels, a Mercury dime. Bright as if they’d just been minted.
I spent the dime on gum. The rest went in the bag with all the other money, to the newspaper office. Nobody there ever said anything about it. I think the woman who counted the money had been getting 1931 coins from Route Fourteen for so long that she’d stopped seeing them.
The papers disappeared. Every morning I’d lay the new one inside the storm door, and every morning, the next day, it was gone. Nobody ever took it in while I was there. I never saw a light. I tried, a couple of times, to hang around in the alders at five in the morning and watch, and I never saw anything, and then it would be time for school.
In November the papers started coming back.
They’d be on the porch rail on Friday, beside the envelope. A week’s worth, neatly folded. Somebody had read them. They were creased the way a paper gets creased when you read it at a kitchen table. And on every front page, somebody had done something to the date.
They’d crossed out the year. In pencil, very neatly, a line through 1988, and above it, in small, careful, old-fashioned handwriting: 1931.
Every single one. Monday’s, Tuesday’s, Wednesday’s. Nov. 14, ~~1988~~ 1931.
I didn’t tell my parents. Twelve-year-olds don’t. I told Marcus, at the bus stop. He looked at me for a long time and then he said that it had been happening the whole time he’d had the route. That it happened every November, for a few weeks, and then it stopped.
He said, “Don’t write anything back.”
I said I hadn’t thought of writing anything back.
“Yeah,” he said. “Don’t.”
On the third Friday of November there was something else written in the margin of the Monday paper, beside the crossed-out date. It was in the same small hand, but shakier, as though written slowly.
They tell me it is later than this. Is it?
I stood on the porch in the rain and read it four or five times. Then I put it in my bag and biked home and sat on the floor of the garage and looked at it. I thought about someone in that house, in the dark, reading the paper every morning. Reading about the Seahawks and the election and the price of gas, and drawing a neat line through the year, and writing in the one he knew. Week after week. Year after year. Since before my grandparents were born.
I thought he must be so lonely.
I took a pencil. Under his question, in the margin, I wrote: Yes. It’s 1988. I’m sorry.
On Saturday morning I laid it inside the storm door with the new paper, face up.
On Sunday morning, at about 5:15, with the fat Sunday paper in my wagon, I came around the bend at the end of Cedar Bend and every window in 1104 was lit.
Yellow, soft, old light. Like lamplight. Upstairs and down. The front door was open behind the storm door, and the hall inside was bright, and I could see a staircase and a runner and a coat on a hook.
There was a man in the front window. Standing, looking out at the road. A young man, maybe twenty-five, in a white shirt and suspenders, with his hair slicked back. He had the Saturday paper in his hands, open, and he was looking out at me.
He raised one hand. He nodded at me. Formally, like a man thanking you for holding a door.
Then, while I watched, he got older.
It didn’t happen quickly. I want to be honest about that. It took maybe a minute, the whole thing, and I stood in the road with the wagon and watched it the entire time. His hair went thin and gray. His shoulders came down. His face folded in on itself, deeper and deeper, his cheeks hollowing, his eyes going pale. He leaned on the window frame. He kept looking at me the whole time. He didn’t look frightened. He looked like someone reading the end of a long book.
When he was very old, he folded the paper, slowly, and set it down out of my sight. He took one last look out at the road. And then the lights went out, all at once, every window, and the house was dark.
I left the Sunday paper on the porch, inside the storm door, face up. The front door behind it was shut and nailed with the county notice, just as it had always been.
On Monday, Tuesday, Wednesday, the papers stayed there, untouched, piling up. On Friday there was no envelope. I told the circulation office that 1104 Cedar Bend had canceled. The woman at the desk pulled the card, read it, and then sat there with it in her hands.
“Since 1931,” she said. “Huh.” She looked at me over her glasses. “Did he say why?”
I said he’d found out what year it was.
The house was demolished in 1993. There’s a little park there now, by the river. I live in Olympia. I’m fifty. I think about him every November.
I’m telling this now because last week I got a delivery at my house. An old-fashioned envelope, thin and yellow, no return address, on my porch rail, held down by a stone.
Inside was a single dime. 1931. Bright as if it had just been minted.
And a slip of paper, in small, careful, old-fashioned handwriting, a little shaky: Thank you for telling me. It is later than you think, too.