Mr. Fenn ran the high school scoreboard for forty-three years and never missed a game.
I want you to understand what never means in a town like Arden Falls. It means the Thursday in 1991 the water main went and we played in a gym with buckets on the baseline. It means the night his wife Ottilie was two days in the ground and he was up in that booth at 6:40 with the clock already set. It means badminton. Nobody goes to badminton. Fenn went to badminton.
Every game — football, basketball, the badminton nobody attended — Fenn was in the booth.
Reliable as the anthem.
My name is Verlie Straatsma. I’m seventy-one. I was the records clerk for Cheyne County Schools from 1979 until they walked me out with a sheet cake in 2016, and I sat in the third row of that gymnasium on the ninth of May for his retirement night, and I was the only person in the building who already knew what was coming.
Not the details. I want to be honest about that. I didn’t know about the envelopes.
I knew what he had. I never once asked him what he did with it.
At his retirement night, a former player took the mic holding an old envelope.
Randall Pettibone. Forty-nine years old now, works a bucket truck for the electric co-op, has a neck like a fire hydrant and did not want to be up there. He’d gotten a certificate and a folding chair on the floor with the other alumni and he stood up out of turn, which is not something Randall does.
Inside: a handwritten stat sheet of his own junior season — every tackle, every game — mailed to him decades ago with a note: “Someone was watching. Someone kept score.”
He read it out loud and his voice went at “watching,” and four hundred people in a hot gymnasium sat there listening to a fifty-year-old lineman lose it over a piece of notebook paper.
The paper was soft. You could see it from the third row. That paper had been unfolded and refolded on the same four creases for thirty-one years, the way people handle a thing they take out when it’s bad.
He said the postmark was February. Not October, not the end of the season. February — three months after the last game, when a boy has stopped hearing about it and the gym is somebody else’s sport and nobody has said his name out loud since November.
I thought about that later more than anything else that happened that night. The man waited on purpose.
Then he did the thing that turned that night into something else.
He asked the crowd: anyone else?
Hands everywhere.
I have never seen anything like it and I have been to every event in that building for four decades. It wasn’t a few. It was a wave, from the floor up through the bleachers, hands going up in ones and twos and then in whole rows, men in their sixties, women in their thirties, a kid who graduated last spring.
The kids whose parents worked doubles. The ones with empty bleacher seats behind them.
That’s who it was. You could see it as it happened — the shape of it. It was not the stars. Not one of the four boys in the trophy case put a hand up. It was the second-string. The manager. The girl who ran the two-mile in a field of nine.
For forty-three years, Fenn had hand-copied stats for every player nobody came for — and mailed them proof they’d been seen.
Somebody in the bleachers yelled how, Dell.
And he stood there at the bottom of the bleachers in a windbreaker with the mic held down at his hip like he’d been caught at something, and then he shrugged and said the two sentences that are on a coffee mug in the concession stand now.
“The board shows who won.”
“The envelopes show who mattered. Different scoreboard.”
They gave him eleven minutes. I timed it, because timing things is what I did for a living, and because I needed something to do with my hands.
Here is what nobody in that gymnasium thought about, and what I could not stop thinking about.
Dellwood Fenn is eighty-four years old. He was writing out Randall Pettibone’s junior season — every tackle, every game — thirty-one years ago, in ink, at a kitchen table, from memory.
Except nobody has that memory. Not for four hundred and eleven kids. Not for forty-three years of Tuesday nights.
He wasn’t remembering.
He was reading.
And there is exactly one person alive who knows where he got it, and she was sitting in the third row with her purse in her lap, clapping like everyone else, doing arithmetic.
Thirty-seven signatures. Thirty-seven certificates, one a year, each one swearing a thing was done that I did not do.
People came up to him afterward for an hour. I stayed in my seat and watched the line, and it was not a receiving line for a retiring employee. It was too quiet for that. Men waited their turn with their hands folded in front of them like they were at a viewing.
Ottilie Fenn has been dead nineteen years. They never had children. That man went home from that gymnasium to a house with one coffee cup in the drainer, the same as he has every night since 2006, and I knew the house, and I knew what was in the garage behind it.
I went home that night and sat in the car in my own driveway for a while, with the engine off, doing the same subtraction over and over.
And somewhere in that parking lot, a girl in a hoodie who’d been filming her uncle get his certificate had four minutes of Dellwood Fenn on her phone.
She posted it Sunday.
PART 2
The video went around for eleven days and then the district’s lawyer sent Mr. Fenn a letter.
Not a thank you. A demand.
Here’s what four hundred people clapping in a gymnasium did not know, and what I have known since 1983.
Athletic scorebooks are district property. They are public records. Every state has a retention schedule, and ours says scorebooks are held ten years and then destroyed, and the records custodian signs a certificate of destruction attesting that it happened.
I was the records custodian.
In June of 1983, my second year, I was down in the basement of the administration building with a hand truck and forty-one scorebooks from the seventies, and the incinerator contract was Thursday, and I stood there and read one.
November 1974. Girls’ basketball, which had existed at Arden Falls for about ten minutes at that point. A girl named Dorcas Wheeler-Pham, seven points, four rebounds, and a small pencil mark in the margin I didn’t understand.
And I thought: this is the only place in the world this happened.
That’s not sentiment. That’s the literal fact of it. There is no other record. The newspaper ran a paragraph on football and nothing else. The yearbook ran a photo. The only document on this earth that says what that girl did on a Tuesday in November is a spiral book I have been ordered to burn on Thursday.
I didn’t burn it.
I carried them out to Dellwood Fenn’s garage in banker’s boxes, four at a time, after dark, because he was the official scorer and the only person I could think of who would understand why.
And then I did it again in 1984. And every June after that for thirty-seven years.
Two hundred and nine books.
Every single envelope that went up in that gymnasium exists because of a records violation with my signature on it.
So when Superintendent Loralei Vandersteen called my house on a Tuesday, I already knew, and she was very careful with me, and it took her four minutes to ask it.
“Verlie. Are those books still in existence?”
A reporter from the county paper had filed a public records request. Not a hostile one. She wanted to do a follow-up on the envelopes, and she’d asked for the scorebooks the way any reasonable person would, assuming a school keeps its own records.
And the district had to answer her in writing.
There are only two answers. Either the books were destroyed as certified — in which case the district is telling a reporter that Dellwood Fenn’s garage doesn’t have what half the county just watched him admit to on video. Or they weren’t — in which case thirty-seven certificates signed by Verlie Straatsma are false statements in a public record.
I said yes. They’re in existence.
She was quiet and then she said, “Oh, honey.”
Thaddeus Brommel is the district’s counsel and he is not a bad man; he’s a man with a client. His letter to Fenn was three paragraphs and the phrase in it was unlawfully retained property of the district and the ask was that the collection be returned within fourteen days for proper disposition.
Proper disposition means destroyed.
Fenn called me after he got it. First time in nine years we’d talked about the books out loud.
He said, “Verlie, they can have every one of them.”
I said good.
And he said, “After I take the margins out.”
I said what margins.
There was a long pause on that phone, and Dellwood Fenn, who has never in his life asked me for anything, said, “You never read them, did you.”
PART 3
I drove out there Thursday.
That garage has a woodstove and a card table and two hundred and nine books on steel shelving he built himself, by decade, in order, and he had one open on the table under a clip lamp, waiting for me.
Football, 1994.
The scorebook part is the scorebook part. Downs, yardage, the official’s initials, all of it in his block printing, tidy as a bank statement.
The margin is something else.
Down the right side of every page, next to the roster, there are small pencil marks. A dot next to a name. Sometimes two. Sometimes three.
I asked him what the dots were.
He said, “How many were there for him.”
Not attendance. Not the crowd. How many people in that building were there for that particular child. Fenn sat in a booth eight feet above the bleachers for forty-three years and he could see every seat, and he knew every family in this town, and while he ran the clock he counted.
One dot. Two dots. A blank.
The blanks are how he made his list. That’s the whole system. No committee, no criteria, no charity. A boy with no dots on Friday got an envelope in the mail, and the numbers inside were true because he’d written them down himself an hour earlier.
I stood in that garage and understood that in two hundred and nine books there is a mark, or the absence of one, next to the name of every child who has come through Arden Falls High School since 1974.
That’s a forty-three-year documented record of which children in this town were alone.
And a reporter has requested it, and the district is about to have to say whether it exists.
I said, “Dell. They cannot see this. Somebody’s mother is eighty-eight years old and she is going to find out she is a blank.”
And he turned the page around and told me to read what was in the other margin, the left one, and I hadn’t even noticed there was a left margin.
There is. It’s smaller. It’s the reasons.
Mother at Cheyne General, third shift.
Father in Bremerton until the yard lets out.
Grandmother can’t do the stairs, watches from the car in the lot, headlights on.
Mother asked me to tell him she asked.
Forty-three years. Every blank has a line beside it. Not one of them says a parent didn’t care. Not one. The man was in that booth writing down everybody’s alibi.
He said, “People aren’t absent, Verlie. They’re somewhere else. There’s a difference and somebody’s got to be the one writing down which.”
I found Randall Pettibone’s page. Junior year, 1994, the season on the sheet he read into a microphone.
Nine games. Nine blanks.
And nine times in that left margin, in different weeks, in the same pencil: Mother at Cheyne General, third shift. Told me to tell him she asked.
She asked. Every week. For a whole season. Ilse Pettibone worked nights in the laundry at that hospital for nineteen years and she called the school on Fridays to ask a man in a booth how her son had done, because she could not be in the seat.
Randall did not know that. Randall is forty-nine years old and stood up in front of four hundred people and cried about an envelope, and he does not know that his mother called.
She died in 2011.
I said we have to tell him.
And Fenn said, “You tell one, you’ve told the town. And then everybody in Arden Falls gets to go look up their own page, and some of them are going to find a blank with nothing written next to it.”
I said there aren’t any of those.
He said, “There are four.”
PART 4
The board set it for the eighteenth of June. Item nine. Recovery and disposition of district records improperly retained.
Brommel’s position hardened the week before, and I don’t blame him for it, because a second request came in and this one was not from a reporter.
A man named Corwin Ashby-Dural, class of 1999, retained a lawyer in Toledo and demanded to inspect his own page and every page referencing him. He is entitled to ask. And the moment one person has a right to see it, the district is in the business of deciding who else does, and the district does not want that business.
The other thing that happened that week is that the county prosecutor’s office called the administration building and asked, in a friendly and procedural way, for copies of the thirty-seven certificates.
Loralei drove to my house to tell me herself rather than let me hear it. She sat at my kitchen table and said the words tampering with records out loud and then apologized for saying them.
I asked her what happens to Fenn.
She said nothing happens to Fenn. He never signed anything. He received boxes from the person authorized to dispose of them, which is the cleanest defense there is — the custodian gave them to him, and the custodian is me.
That’s the part I hadn’t worked out until she said it at my own table. Forty-three years of envelopes, and the whole structure rests on one clerk’s signature, and it is not his.
He’d have taken it. I know that about him. But you can’t confess to a records violation you didn’t have the authority to commit.
I’m seventy-one. I have a pension from that district and a house with eleven years left on it, and I signed my name thirty-seven times to a thing that wasn’t true, on purpose, every June, in a building I was proud to work in.
I want to say I did it for the children of this town. Part of that is honest.
The rest of it is that I could not stand to burn the only proof a thing had happened.
Fenn’s heart went into that arrhythmia again on the twelfth and he spent two nights at Cheyne General, and Randall Pettibone drove him home because Fenn does not have anybody, and Randall still didn’t know that his mother had spent nineteen years in the basement of that same building.
The town split, and it split in a way I did not expect and that I think about still.
The people defending him hardest were not the ones with envelopes. It was their kids. Grown people in their thirties posting about a man they never met, because their father had shown them a piece of notebook paper once.
And the people who wanted the collection gone were not administrators. They were four or five families who had done the same arithmetic I did in that gymnasium and arrived somewhere worse — that if there’s a list of the children nobody came for, then there is also, necessarily, a list of the parents who didn’t come.
Nobody said that at a meeting. They said it at the Kwik Stop.
Two days before the board meeting I drove out to the garage with a legal pad to inventory the boxes for Brommel, because if we were going to hand them over I wanted a list, and a list is the one thing I have ever been good at.
The garage door was up.
The shelving was empty.
Two hundred and nine books, gone. Steel shelves, bare, and the clip lamp still on over an empty card table, and dust squares where the boxes had sat for thirty-seven years.
I went up to the house shaking and Dellwood Fenn was at his kitchen window with his coffee, watching me come.
I said somebody’s taken them.
He said, “I know.”
I said Dell, the prosecutor —
And he said, “Verlie, go home. There’s something on your porch.”
There was.
One book. Not a banker’s box, one spiral scorebook, set square in the middle of my porch swing with a rock on it so it wouldn’t blow.
Football, 1994.
Same year as Randall. My son Emory’s junior year.
I sat down on the swing and opened it to the roster page with my reading glasses in my hand and I did not put them on for a long time, because in thirty-seven years of carrying those boxes out of that basement I had never once looked up my own child.
PART 5
Emory Straatsma. Number 64. Nine games.
Nine blanks.
I made a sound on that porch I have not made since my mother died.
I worked nights during the school year. That’s what a records clerk does in a district that can’t pay overtime — you do the day job at the counter and you do the filing after five, and Friday was the only night the building was quiet enough to get anything done. My husband was gone by then. My mother was in the back bedroom with the oxygen.
I was in that building. Every single Friday. Two hundred yards from the field, under a fluorescent light, doing retention schedules.
Nine blanks, and in the left margin, nine times, in that same pencil:
Mother in the district office. She’s here. He doesn’t know to look up.
The boxes went to the Cheyne County Historical Society. Randall Pettibone and about thirty men and women with pickup trucks moved them in one evening, and I have never gotten a straight answer about who called who.
It turns out that was not a crime and not even clever. It’s just the thing none of us knew.
A retention schedule sets a minimum, not a maximum, and every schedule in this state has a provision for records of enduring historical value to be transferred to an archive instead of destroyed. It has been sitting in the manual I administered for thirty-seven years, on page fourteen. If I had read my own manual in 1983 I could have walked those forty-one books across the street to the historical society in the daylight with a form.
Thirty-seven years of banker’s boxes after dark, and there was a form.
The board voted seven to nothing on the eighteenth to formally transfer the collection and to reclassify athletic scorebooks as permanent. It took four minutes. Brommel wrote the resolution himself and he wrote it well.
The prosecutor declined. There was no gain and no concealment of anything but affection, and the elected prosecutor of Cheyne County graduated in 1988 and put his hand up in that gymnasium.
The collection is open to the public. There are rules Loralei and the historical society wrote together, and the rule that matters is that you may read your own page and no one else’s, and you have to come sit in the room to do it. Two hundred and forty people have come. They keep a sign-in book, which I find funny in a way I can’t explain to anyone under sixty.
Randall came the second day.
He read nine weeks of told me to tell him she asked and then he went out to his truck in the parking lot of the historical society and stayed there fifty minutes, and then he came back in and asked if he could photocopy it, and the volunteer said yes.
It’s in a frame in the break room at the electric co-op. I’ve seen it.
The four blanks with nothing beside them — Fenn found three of them and wrote the reasons in this June, thirty and forty years late, after driving around this county asking questions of people in their eighties. The fourth one he says he’ll get.
They put his name on the booth. He hates it.
I called Emory on the Sunday after the board meeting. He’s forty-seven, he’s in Dayton, he’s got the two girls.
I told him about the book and the dots and the nine blanks and I apologized, and I got about as far as I should have been in those bleachers before he stopped me.
He said, “Mom. I got one.”
I said one what.
He said an envelope. February of 1996, his senior year, at the apartment in Dayton his freshman year of college. Handwritten stat sheet, junior and senior seasons both, every game. He has it in a footlocker. He has moved it eleven times.
I asked him why he never told me.
And my son said, “Because I thought you sent it. It said someone was watching. I thought that was you telling me you knew.”
I couldn’t say anything.
Then Emory said, “There was an extra line on mine, at the bottom. Different pen. I never understood it till right now.”
I asked him what it said.
“It said, your mother was at every game — she was just where you couldn’t see her.“
And then he said, “I read that part until it came apart at the fold.”
