The smell of dry chicory and burnt roast used to mean six in the morning in our house. Arthur would stand by the counter with his plaid flannel shirt half-buttoned, waiting for the Mr. Coffee to spit out its dark, bitter water into the glass pot while the floorboards groaned under his heavy socks. I always came down about ten minutes later with my own chipped yellow mug, filling it with hot water from the electric kettle and dropping in whatever orange pekoe or Earl Grey was on sale down at the Piggly Wiggly.
We did that for forty-six years without missing a Tuesday or a Christmas. Two pots, two mugs, and a silent understanding that neither of us needed to talk until the second cup was halfway gone. When he got sick in February of last year, I blamed the stomach acid. He started leaving the coffee alone, pushing the Folgers can back toward the wall and boiling water in the small copper saucepan instead. I figured it was just the pills Dr. Evans gave him for his liver. The doctors always say to cut out caffeine when the blood tests start looking muddy, so I did not think twice about it. I just bought him a box of cheap green tea from the Piggly Wiggly and stacked it next to the toaster. He drank it without complaining, though he always let the bag steep until the water turned the color of ditch water before he fished it out with a spoon.
By November, the coughing had gotten into his chest so bad he could barely make it down the three steps to the back porch to check the mail, and his handwriting looked like a spider walking through ink. He died on a bitter Tuesday morning in January while the furnace was rattling against the baseboards. I kept his heavy blue ceramic mug sitting right there on the front burner of the stove until March because moving it felt like admitting he was never coming back down the stairs. When I finally picked it up to shove it into the dark back of the cabinet where the punch bowl goes, I noticed a patch of dust on the laminate counter that looked too square. That was when I reached behind the red plastic Folgers container and my knuckles hit cold metal.
It was an old tobacco tin, the heavy kind with a brass hinge that my daddy used to keep his pipe cleaners in, but it had been wrapped around the middle with two thick loops of gray duct tape so tight the edges were biting into the tin.
I pulled it out into the light by the window and my thumb caught on a little paper luggage tag wired right through the latch. The ink was ballpoint, shaky and leaning hard to the left the way Arthur’s handwriting had started doing ever since his fingers went stiff from the neuropathy. November 14 was scrawled at the top in numbers that looked like they had been dragged across the paper by someone who was tired of fighting the pen. I sat down at the kitchen table right then with my coat still on, my heart doing that slow, heavy thud against my ribs that usually meant I had forgotten to take my blood pressure pills. I didn’t reach for a knife or scissors. I just picked at the end of the gray tape with my fingernail until the glue gave way with a dry, ripping sound that echoed off the empty cupboards.
When the lid popped open, I wasn’t expecting anything except maybe some old spare keys or some pennies he had collected from the laundry room floor. Instead, the inside was packed so tight it looked like a soldier’s kit, with small paper tea bags laid out in neat, overlapping rows like shingles on a roof. They weren’t store-bought boxes either. They were little muslin pouches, the kind you buy at the apothecary downtown for loose herbs, tied shut at the top with white sewing thread. I took one out and smelled it, and it didn’t smell like commercial tea at all. It smelled like dried chamomile and peppermint and a little bit of root that I couldn’t quite name, the exact same bitter-sweet smell that had been drifting out of the kitchen during those last three months when he wouldn’t touch his coffee anymore.
I spent the next hour just sitting there at that table with the tin between my elbows, counting them one by one like a woman checking her grocery change after the clerk has already handed her the bag. I laid them out in little piles of ten on the yellow Formica, row after row, until they covered the whole space where our breakfast plates used to sit. There were thirty-six piles of ten, and then five left over by the salt shaker. Three hundred and sixty-five little muslin sacks, every single one of them tied with the same length of white thread, all packed into that grease-stained tobacco box like he was afraid the world was going to end before he finished them. I didn’t understand it then. I thought maybe he had gone a little touched in the head during those final weeks when the pain medicine made him stare at the wallpaper for hours without blinking.
Arthur was not a sentimental man by any stretch of the imagination, and the idea of him sitting at the kitchen table late at night when the house was quiet, meticulously measuring out dried leaves into little squares of cloth while his hands were shaking so bad he dropped half of them on the floor, felt like something I would expect from a stranger rather than the man who used to complain about the price of beef roast every Thursday. I put the tea bags back into the tin one by one, trying to get them to fit the way he had them, but I couldn’t make them lie as flat as he did. My hands were shaking too much, and every time I looked at that little paper tag with the November date, I kept hearing him shuffling down the hallway in his slippers, coughing that dry, rattling cough that sounded like dry leaves scraping across a concrete driveway.
The next afternoon I drove down to the clinic on Fourth Street because Dr. Evans has known us since we moved into the county back in seventy-eight, and I needed someone to tell me whether my husband had lost his mind before he died. Dr. Evans was sitting behind his desk with a file open to Arthur’s last blood work, looking like he needed a nap more than I did. He didn’t even look up when I set the tin down on the corner of his examination table, right on top of a stack of sample pamphlets for arthritis cream. He just sighed and took off his wire-rimmed glasses, pinching the bridge of his nose where the little plastic pads had left two red dents in his skin. “He came in here alone back in late October, Martha,” Dr. Evans said, and his voice sounded thin and dry like old paper. “He knew the liver numbers weren’t coming back down.
I told him straight, because Arthur was never a man for soft soap. I told him he had maybe until the first hard frost if we were lucky, and spring if the wind didn’t blow too cold.” I sat down on the little vinyl stool by the door because my knees felt like they were made of wet saltine crackers. “He didn’t say a word about any tea,” I told him, and my voice sounded smaller than I wanted it to. “He just sat there and asked if green tea would settle his stomach better than the black roast. That was all he said.” Dr. Evans put his glasses back on and looked at the metal box with those tired old eyes that had watched half the people in this county into the ground. “He wasn’t asking about his stomach, Martha. He was already working on the math. Arthur was an engineer before he was anything else, and engineers don’t know how to say goodbye with words.
They use numbers because numbers don’t shake when you’re scared.”
I didn’t go straight home after leaving the clinic. I drove out past the grain elevator and down the old county road where the sumac was turning brown along the ditch banks, just letting the truck roll until the engine started ticking in that familiar way it always did when it was low on oil. I kept thinking about Arthur sitting at that kitchen table while I was upstairs folding laundry or watching the evening news in the parlor, measuring out spoonfuls of chamomile in the dark because he knew he wouldn’t be around to pour my water when the snow started melting in April. It made me feel small and stupid, like I had been living next door to a man for nearly fifty years without ever learning how his language worked. I had spent all those months wishing he would talk more, wishing he would tell me he was scared or angry or just tired of hurting, while all along he was sitting three rooms away with a bag of string and a pile of dried leaves, trying to figure out how to make sure I had a cup of hot water waiting for me every single morning after he was gone.
When I finally pulled back into the driveway, the house looked cold and gray against the late afternoon sky, the kind of gray that makes you want to pull the curtains and pretend the world stopped turning somewhere back around 1990. I walked through the side door and the kitchen was sitting there just like I left it, with the yellow Formica and the empty coffee pot and the little metal tin still resting right where I had put it by the toaster.
I didn’t turn on the overhead light. I just walked over to the stove and filled the small copper saucepan with water from the tap, the way he used to do when his stomach was acting up and he couldn’t face the smell of the Folgers. I turned the burner on high and stood there in the growing dark, watching the little blue ring of fire lick against the bottom of the pan while the house settled around me with those little pops and groans old wood makes when the temperature drops. When the water started to mutter and bubble at the edges, I reached into the tin and pulled out the very first teabag from the top row, the one with the crooked knot that looked like it had been tied by a man who couldn’t feel his fingers anymore. I dropped it into my old yellow mug and poured the boiling water over it, watching the steam rise up into the cold air and smell like peppermint and old paper and the back of Arthur’s flannel shirt.
I didn’t cry while I waited for it to steep. I just stood there with my hands wrapped around the hot ceramic, feeling the heat soak right through my palms and up into my wrists where the blood runs fast. It wasn’t magic, and it didn’t bring him back down the stairs in his heavy socks, and the kitchen still smelled like cold linoleum and old vinegar. But as I took that first sip and felt the hot tea go down my throat tasting of nothing fancy at all, just dry leaves and something steady that stayed behind when everything else was gone, I knew exactly what he meant by every single one of those three hundred and sixty-five little knots. He wasn’t leaving me alone in that house after all. He was just waiting for me to catch up to the morning.
