No one could say when the town started coming apart. First the mill cut shifts. Then pay. Bread got a little higher every month until people stopped pretending not to notice. Jobs vanished quietly; older workers still kept showing up for weeks in the parking lots.
Main Street emptied of business. The shoe store closed first, then the pharmacy, then the diner with the great breakfast and sawdust-tasting meatloaf. Potholes everywhere. People learned to walk gingerly.
Everything came through screens now. Charts nobody understood. Committees explaining delays, shortages, temporary disruptions. Every week a different person in charge, saying the same thing, nobody believed.
Then the agents, men with ladders, arrived.
They came in at dusk on flatbeds with the ladders stacked neat as rifles. Heavy canvas coats, greenish gray under the streetlights. Thick gloves, heavy boots. Always speaking low enough no one could hear them.
They carried coal up three flights for old tenants with bad hips. Fixed dead boilers in flooded basements. When Liz Marecek slipped on the ice, two gray coats showed up in an ambulance within a minute. One sat beside her in the hospital all night with a gloved hand resting over hers.
After they started showing up everywhere.
Things started working again. The streetlights flickered. Freight trains ran through town at night. Heat came back to buildings that had been cold for years.
The town had been exhausted so long people wouldn’t ask questions.
The war memorial in the square had eighteen names on its stone. One Tuesday morning several gray coats leaned ladders against it and started sanding the names away. Werner watched from across the street, hands in pockets, as dust drifted through the air. By evening the stone looked smooth: nobody had ever died in the war at all.
The pamphlets came before dawn. Folded sheets pushed through mail slots. Title: THE TOWN MUST BE RESTORED.
Werner read his sitting at the kitchen table. One line lodged in his head and stayed: A man whose labor has been discarded is not worthless. He has been abandoned.
He went to the address printed at the bottom. An old warehouse, two blocks from him. Inside, several gray coats stood on a platform. Suddenly they began, clamoring about dignity, work, betrayal. And the town they remembered and they were owed.
A large photograph hung behind the gray coats: a middle-aged avuncular man, appearing in deep thought. Werner never heard anyone say his name.
When the meeting ended, they passed around the paper. Werner signed his name.
Soon the grocery shelves filled again, though the packages looked similar. The buses ran exactly on time. The streets got quieter at night.
Then one morning Werner went into the pharmacy and found an agent behind the counter. Next to him lay his coat and a ladder.
Werner asked where the pharmacist had gone.
The gray coat only grimaced.
Werner walked out. Have a nice day.
Werner sees two agents across the street lift a ladder to a second-floor window. One stays down to steady the base, the other climbs. Werner watches the boots rise rung by rung.
J.S. O’Keefe is a trilingual translator and writer. He has published over 500 short stories, creative essays and poems in print and online literary journals.
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