When I went through my father’s papers after his death, I was a bit surprised to find an insurance policy on earthquakes. Now, since Sand Road has been forever plagued by occasional floods, an insurance policy addressing that problem wouldn’t have seemed out of place, but the best I was able to tell from a few hours of research over at Mississippi State, in recorded history Lowndes County, Miss., has never suffered a tremor vigorous enough to spook a chicken from her roost.

The coverage was something like $5,000 for structural damage with a limit of $1,500 on the foundation.

For this protection Daddy paid a one-time premium of $75 so that he and mother could sleep easy at night, content that should the great quake come, they were only a phone call away from having the walls and roof put back up at someone else’s expense.

How, I wondered, did he end up with an earthquake policy? I mean, surely he didn’t run across this insurance in Outdoor Life or Field and Stream, about all he ever read, and decide, “By jingoes, we ought to have that!” (By jingoes was one of his favorite expressions, though I never understood it. I doubt that he ever knew what a jingo is. Or cared.)

A bit farther into the stacks, among clutches of paper yellowed with age, I found three little brown books issued by an insurance company out of Birmingham.

They were the size of bank passbooks. In each of them, in a tiny, cramped hand, there was a careful log of weekly payments on burial insurance for mother, me, and my brother.

For five years he paid 10 cents a week on each on those policies, for a face value of $250 apiece upon redemption. (When mother died and I turned her book over to the funeral home, the gentleman with whom I dealt admitted that he would simply give credit for the $250 and never bother to try to track the company down and make a claim – “It would cost more than $250 to get that money out them, if they’re still around–it’s what they counted on from the beginning.”)

As I sat there in the quiet house studying those little books, a memory stirred from way back: A slender, bent little balding man who every Saturday morning parked his car out on the edge of the road and walked up the drive to the back door, where he knocked gently until daddy or mother let him in.

He would smile and take a seat on one side of the kitchen table, daddy on the other, and then daddy slid the dimes across the formica, one at a time, in some sort of self-conceived ritual that the insurance man seemed not to mind.

The dimes pocketed, he would take the three little brown books from daddy, one at a time, and carefully make his entries in pen, blow to dry the ink, then hand the books back, one at a time. From his battered satchel he took a ledger, opened it, and laboriously copied the payments in, blew the ink dry, and closed it and put it back into the satchel.

The ceremony over, the little man would rise and nod goodbye and leave, and all the while not a word was said — no hello, no how are you, no goodbye, no see you next week.

He would walk slowly to his car, get in, and drive down the road a few hundred yards and stop, get out, and visit two other houses. Every Saturday morning, for years.

After I had stashed the burial-insurance books in a safe place, I pulled the earthquake insurance papers out again and studied them. And there it was: that tiny, cramped print that logged every week’s dimes in the little brown books.

Now it was clear. Some Saturday morning, decades ago, while I was still a boy roaming the river, the man had lingered, had perhaps accepted a cup of mother’s coffee, then reached into his satchel and drawn out statistics and photographs and there in the kitchen, with mother staying away from the table but not out of hearing or seeing, he made his pitch about how the Big One was looming just beyond the horizon, the fault line near Memphis just straining to slip and grind and jolt and the earth would open up and heave and every house in north Mississippi would jiggle from its footings and tilt and collapse into a pile of rubble.

And then he had shown daddy the photographs, chronicling earthquake devastation from all over the country. “And it can happen here,” he might have said, and daddy would have studied the pictures, with mother straining to see but saying nothing, and thought long and hard about how much work he had put into that house, how many long years he had made double payments to get it paid off years early so that he could say to any man alive that he didn’t owe a penny on his place.

“And then he would have nodded and said to the little man across the table, “Yes, it could happen. How much will it cost me to protect the place, and how many years will I have to pay my dimes.”

And the little man would have said, “Earthquakes are more likely than people dying. You need protection now, and that means money now. I have no control over this. I must have $75 before I leave.”

I am only speculating. But this is the way I envision it. daddy would have paid out a dime a week on each of us forever to see that we got a decent burial smany year ages hence.

But the earthquake might very well be brewing as he sat staring at those terrible photographs, so I can see him getting up from the table and going back into the bedroom and rummaging around in a closet, accumulating dollar bills and fives and tens from wherever he had stashed them all those years, saving maybe for a new shotgun, and finally coming back into the kitchen and with neither frown nor smile laying the money in a heap before the little bent man, who one crumpled bill at a time counted and neatly stacked it, finally placing it deep in his satchel and writing out a receipt.

And perhaps there would have been a handshake, but I doubt it. Only the shadow of the insurance man thrown across the kitchen floor as he slipped through the screen door, off to other clients, who might or might not be persuaded that an earthquake was coming.

And daddy sitting quietly at the table studying the receipt and wondering what else there was to protect from the dark, inimical forces that gathered in his world.





Paul Ruffin, 2009 Texas State Poet Laureate, may be reached through his Web site at pauldruffin.com.