Chapter 11
VIRGIL KILGORE: There's maybe forty men in this country gave me a room when I couldn't draw twenty people. Most of them are dead now or they've got a hardware store. Not one of them ever asked me for a thing afterward.
(pause)
That's a kind of person and they don't make the movie.
Ruby Cofield called on a Tuesday at eight in the morning, which is when people call about a death.
Amber had met her four times in fifteen years and would not have picked her out of a line, and she knew who it was before the woman finished the first sentence, because there is a particular flatness people get.
"Arliss went Sunday night," Ruby said. "He'd been going since October. It wasn't a shock and I'm not going to pretend it was."
"Ruby, I'm so sorry."
"Well." A long breath on the line. "I'm calling to ask you for something and I want you to say no if it's no."
"Ask."
"There's no pictures of him."
Amber sat down at somebody else's kitchen table.
"He wouldn't be in one," Ruby said. "Fifty-three years and I have got him at our girl's wedding with his eyes shut and I have got the one on his license.
That's the sum of it. And the funeral home wants something for the board and the girls want something for the paper and I have been through every drawer in this house since Monday. "
"He's in the barn," Amber said.
There was a silence.
"Say that again."
"Arliss is in my barn. November of ninety-five, at Tandy's, at the end of the second night.
Somebody took it on a disposable and it got mailed to the office in 2011 with about sixty others and I sleeved it and carded it.
" She was already standing. "He's got his hand on the back of Virgil's neck and he's laughing at something off to the left. "
Ruby Cofield made a sound.
"I'll get it to you today," Amber said.
Here is the problem with that.
She had not been in the barn since the twenty-third of December, and she was not going to be in the barn today, and there was exactly one other person on this earth who could stand in that building and put a hand on that photograph.
She called him at nine.
He picked up before the first ring finished, which told her he had been holding the phone.
"Amber."
"Arliss Cofield died Sunday."
A beat. "Ah, hell."
"Ruby needs a picture for the service and there isn't one. There's one in the barn."
"Tell me where."
"It's not that simple."
"Amber, I'll find it."
"You will not find it," she said, "because there are ninety-one boxes in that building and you have never opened one of them in your life. Put me on speaker and go down there and don't touch anything until I tell you to."
She heard a chair go back. She heard a door. She heard him walking on gravel, and then nothing for a while, and then a sound she knew exactly and could not place for a second because it did not belong in that building.
"Are those bolt cutters?"
"You've got the key," Virgil said.
"There's a spare in the kitchen drawer."
"There is not a spare in the kitchen drawer, Amber, I have been through that drawer."
A snap, and the lock coming off, and the door going over on its track.
"Okay," he said. "I'm in."
"North wall. Third shelf from the bottom."
"There's blue tape on these."
"That's the loose photographic. Count in from the left. Six, seven — stop at seven."
"Seven."
"Bring it to the bench and take the lid off and do not tip it."
She stood in a rented kitchen in Inglewood with the phone against her ear and walked her husband through her own filing system, and it took twenty minutes, and it was the strangest twenty minutes of the winter.
He was hopeless. He read her the wrong card twice. He said "there's a whole thing in here about a dog" and she said that's a session log, put it back face down the way it was, and he said "yes ma'am" without a shred of irony.
Then he went quiet.
"Virgil."
"Hang on."
"Have you got it?"
"I've got it," he said.
She waited.
"He's got his hand on my neck," Virgil said.
"I know."
"I was twenty-three years old."
"You were twenty-three."
Another silence, longer, and she could hear the barn in it, the way that building sounds when nobody is doing anything in it.
"There's writing on the back," he said.
Amber closed her eyes.
"Read it," she said, because she could not have stopped him and because she wanted to hear it.
He read it the way he reads anything, slowly, and badly.
"Arliss Cofield — Tandy's, Russellville KY, Nov '95 — gave V. the Friday and the Saturday when nobody else in the state would."
The refrigerator hummed.
"That's your hand," he said.
"Yes."
"When'd you write that?"
"2014, probably. Whenever I did the loose photographic."
"Nobody was ever going to read this."
"No."
"You wrote when nobody else in the state would on the back of a picture in a box in a barn," he said, "and put it on a shelf."
"That's the job, Virgil."
"That is not the job," he said, and his voice was not right, and she said she had to go, and she went.
Russellville is an hour and a bit up 431 and she drove it on Thursday with the photograph in a rigid mailer on the passenger seat, printed twice at a place on Gallatin Pike because she was not going to hand a widow the original.
She had not planned to stay for the service. She had planned to hand Ruby an envelope and drive home.
Ruby Cofield took the mailer in the vestibule of the funeral home and opened it standing up and did not say anything for a while.
"That's him," she said.
"That's him."
"He's laughing at Dub Sanders. Dub was heckling from the door all night, that's what he's looking at.
" She put her thumb on the edge of the print, not on the face.
"He never once let me come to that room.
Fifty-three years. He said it wasn't a place for me and I said Arliss, I have raised four children in a house with you, and he said that's different. "
She put it back in the mailer.
"You'll stay," Ruby said. It was not a question, and there was no version of the next four seconds in which Amber Galloway said no to it.
She had not been in a room like that in twenty years.
The funeral was at a Baptist church on the edge of town and the fellowship hall afterward was a long low room with a drop ceiling and folding tables and a coffee urn, and Amber stood inside the door with a paper plate and had a strong physical memory of her own wedding, which was the same room in a different county with the same urn.
And there were the men.
Bar owners, most of them retired or dead's-widow's-brother.
A sound man of about eighty with a hearing aid the size of a walnut.
Two brothers who had run a room in Hopkinsville and hated each other and had come in the same truck.
A woman who had booked a place in Elizabethtown for thirty years and had a handshake like a gate latch.
And Virgil in the middle of them.
She stood by the door for a long time and watched him, because he did not know she was there yet, and because she had not seen this in fifteen years.
He was smaller here. That is the only way she has ever been able to put it.
He was not performing and he was not being generous and he was not doing the thing with his laugh.
He was standing with his hands in his pockets listening to an eighty-year-old man tell a story about a monitor board, and when the story ended he said something short and everybody groaned, and one of the Hopkinsville brothers hit him in the arm.
Nobody in that room called him Virgil Kilgore. They called him Kilgore, flat, the way you'd say it to a man who had loaded in through your back door in 1996.
He was, in that fellowship hall, a country bar musician of no particular importance who had done all right.
Amber stood by the coffee urn with a paper plate and felt the whole architecture of the last three months tilt about four degrees, and did not enjoy it.
He saw her at about two o'clock and crossed the room and stopped a proper distance away.
"You came."
"Ruby asked me to stay."
"She does that." He looked at the floor and then back up. "Thank you for the picture. It's on the board by the door. It's the only one on there that isn't a snapshot of him asleep in a chair."
"I saw it."
"They've had about a dozen people in front of it."
"Virgil."
"I'm not doing anything," he said. "I'm telling you a fact about a board."
And he went and got her a coffee she had not asked for and brought it back and then went away again, which was the correct amount, and she stood there holding it and thought: he is getting better at this and I wish he would stop.
The rain started at four and it was not rain.
It came down out of the north the way it does about twice a winter, that fine wet stuff that lands and glazes, and by five the parking lot had a shine on it and the pines on the far side of the road were bending, and somebody's cousin came in and said the parkway was closed at the Logan County line and 431 was worse.
Amber went out to look at her truck and came back in.
"You're not driving that," Ruby said, at her elbow.
"I've driven in worse."
"You have not driven in worse today." Ruby Cofield had buried her husband at eleven o'clock that morning and was standing in a fellowship hall organizing other people's evenings, because that is what such women do and it is how they get through the afternoon.
"There's the room over the garage. It's made up.
Bathroom's down the hall and the heat's on a timer so you want to leave the door open. "
"Ruby —"
"Two of you can't drive back to Nashville on ice."
And there it was.
Amber stood in that room with a paper cup and did the arithmetic in about a second and a half, and the arithmetic was this: to say no she would have to say we don't live together anymore, out loud, at a wake, to a woman whose husband had been in the ground since eleven that morning.
She was not going to do it. Not for anything.
"That's very kind," Amber said.
Virgil, six feet away, did not look at her.