by Sonja Hakala
Frank Dixon is considered an institution in Carding, Vermont. Among his peers in the Social Security set, he’s best remembered as their high school’s star quarterback. He was chosen for that role not because of his dazzling footwork or peerless throwing ability but because nothing ever seemed to rattle him. It didn’t matter if the Carding Bears were down five points in the fourth quarter with just a minute on the clock, Frank would calmly take the ball, step back as though he had all the time in the world, and find the perfect place to throw it to win the game.
After spending time in the Navy and then college, Frank returned to Carding so he could marry his high school sweetheart, Coralee Carter. They built a house out on Jefferson Road when it was still a rudimentary dirt byway, and raised four daughters there.
It took a few years but Jefferson Road was finally paved, making way for other young families to build houses and move in. The kids all played together in the nearby brook, biked furiously up and down the road, and piled onto toboggans to slide down the hill in the Dixons’ backyard.
After trying his hand at selling insurance and then cars, Frank happily settled into working for the post office. He was Carding’s only letter carrier for a couple of years, and then the postmaster retired. When Frank took over that position, his status as a town fixture was cemented.
Now you can imagine how much a postmaster can learn from the coming and going of the mail but Frank made it a point of pride to never, ever gossip. However, he did nurture an uncanny knack of knowing what neighbors needed help and what neighbors were in a position to do the helping.
His former classmates were the first to pick up on his initiatives.
“I saw you and Coralee at the Sutter house this morning carrying a basket through the front door,” someone would remark to Frank in the produce aisle at Cooper’s General Store. “What’s that about?”
That would give Frank an opportunity to say: “Well you know, Herb broke his arm falling from a ladder at the warehouse. He’s gonna be out of work for a while and he and his wife have a new baby.”
That’s all it took to get the casseroles flowing which would be followed by offers of babysitting and discreet help with a mortgage payment or two.
By the time Frank retired, the younger generation of Carding-ites figured the post office would fall down without him. But the new postmaster, Ted Owens, made the transition seamless, even to keeping an eye out for folks who needed help but would not ask for it.
Frank and Coralee had made extensive travel plans, and bought an RV so that they could tour the national parks in style. And that’s what they did for Frank’s first three years of retirement. But then Coralee, who had been plagued with a hereditary form of heart disease, finally succumbed.
After that, the people who loved and cherished Frank, which numbered in the hundreds in Carding, didn’t see him for weeks. He rarely ventured into his yard so his gardens became a weedy mess, and no one saw him in Cooper’s General Store.
When his mail started to pile up in his mailbox, Vivian Smart finally had enough. She rounded up a small group of like-minded folks and they showed up one spring morning to cut Frank’s grass, prune his bushes, and weed his gardens. The next day, the same people plus a few more showed up with food and wine to sit on Frank’s porch to eat supper, talking and laughing as loud as they could until they drove the man out of his house.
Gradually, they coaxed, cajoled, lectured, and sometimes even nagged Frank to become part of Carding’s life again. And the gentle arm-twisting worked. Frank is now a regular volunteer at the library and an avid trail keeper on the many walking paths that crisscross the town. He’s one of the best rose-growers in the county, and regularly lends his hearty baritone to a barbershop quartet.
But there are times when he misses the spontaneous chitchat, conversations, and friendly waves of the folks he used to see when he worked for the post office. You know what I’m talking about, the daily rubbing up against the folks you live among.
That’s why Dave Muzzy’s offer of a paper route appealed to Frank.
Dave Muzzy considered himself an enterprising guy pretty much since the day he was born. He was always nosing about for opportunities, especially of the money-making variety. Some folks considered him a little slick, (“Takes after his Dad a bit too much”), but he was so open and good-natured, everyone forgave him his trespasses. But Carding, Vermont is hardly a metropolis so good-paying jobs for a guy still in high school were thin on the ground. He’d worked with the Carding road crew over the summer, directing traffic around the installation of new culverts on Meetinghouse Road and the new painted lines on Beach Road. But now he was stuck in school, and money-making opportunities were few.
He’d taken up with Wil’s sister, Faye, as summer slid toward fall. They’d known each other for years, of course, so it was difficult to tell when their relationship took on overtones of boyfriend/girlfriend. But they suited one another, laughing and talking about the strangeness of the world, exploring the ponds and lakes of the area in their kayaks, cozying up in Dave’s car at the local drive-in for the last of the summer movies.
It wasn’t until October that they realized they had any differences of opinion at all. It started when Dave sold an old bicycle to one of the Sutter kids. Faye knew the bike was broken, and that the Sutter family struggled to make ends meet. “You are planning to help Ken Sutter fix that bike, aren’t you?” she asked. It would be the right thing to do, after all.
She wasn’t very happy when the only reply she received was a minuscule smirk in one corner of Dave’s mouth. So Faye, who was pretty handy with tools, showed up at the Sutters’ place the next day to repair the bike’s broken spokes and replace its chain.
When Dave found out, he wasn’t happy, and he tried to tease Faye about her “do-godder-ness,” but his jokes fell flat. That’s when the air started to leak out of their relationship.
The final straw was Dave taking on two routes for delivering the local newspaper. “I won’t be able to see you as much,” he’d explained to Faye. “But this is the last job around here that’s still open.”
“But why take on two routes? How are you going to get all those papers out by 8:00 a.m.?” Faye asked. “Just about everyone in town still subscribes to the paper. That’s a lot of miles to drive so early in the morning.”
When Dave squirmed, a sudden thought hit Faye right between the eyes. “Did you hire someone else to do the second route?”
“Maybe.”
“Who? And what are you paying them? No one gets rich delivering papers.”
Dave’s face turned stony. “Never you mind. I’ve got it covered.”
That was a week ago and the conversation left Faye feeling uneasy.
It was time, she decided, to visit her grandmother. Edie would help her untangle the messy snarl of her feelings.
This is Part Two of “Early in the Morning.” It will conclude next Monday. I’m looking forward to seeing you then.
The Carding Chronicles are short stories written by author Sonja Hakala about the Vermont town that no one can quite find on a map. They feature the characters in her four Carding novels.
The Carding books are available from Amazon and the Chronicles appear here, on this website, every Monday. Hope to see you next week.
Sonja Hakala 