The Envelopes in the Blue Tin Trunk

The trunk under our bed

My husband Piet died in the winter, and it took me until the following winter to open the trunk. It is a blue metal trunk, the kind we used to take on the train to Durban when the children were small, and it lived under our bed in the house in Bloemfontein for so many years that I had stopped seeing it. When you live with a thing long enough it becomes part of the wall. I only pulled it out because my hip had got so bad that I could no longer sleep on that side, and I wanted the extra floor space to keep a cushion where I could lower myself down in the mornings.

Inside the trunk, under a folded grey blanket that smelled of him and of dust, were the envelopes. I knew about them the way a wife knows a thing without ever having been formally told. Piet did not trust banks. He said it more than once over the decades, usually at the kitchen table with the newspaper open, muttering that the rand was a bar of soap in a wet hand. So instead of a pension, which he did not believe in, he bought a Krugerrand most years of our marriage. One coin. He would go quietly into town, come back quietly, and that would be the end of it. He never made a speech about it. He just added another envelope to the trunk.

His handwriting on the paper

There were thirty one envelopes. Ordinary brown ones, some of them gone soft at the corners like cloth. On each he had written the year in his blocky engineer's hand, and sometimes a small note. 1974. 1978, and under it, in pencil, the word "drought." 1985. 1990, with a little line that said "Karen's wedding, still managed." I sat on the floor with my bad hip complaining and I held each envelope before I opened it, because his writing was the closest thing left to his voice.

Some years there was no coin, only a note saying why. "Nothing this year, the roof." "Nothing, tax." He was accounting to someone, maybe to me, maybe to himself, maybe to God. I found I was reading them like a diary of our whole life together, told sideways through gold. The year my mother died he had bought two, and written nothing at all, and I understood the silence perfectly.

When I finally tipped the coins out into my lap they were heavier than I remembered, and warmer than metal has any right to be after a year in a cold trunk. Each one had the springbok on the back, mid leap, the way they leap across the road at dusk near my sister's farm. I laid them out on the blanket in rows by year and I cried in a way I had not let myself cry at the funeral, quietly, with nobody in the house to hear.

Why I have to sell some

I am sixty eight. The hip is bone on bone now, the doctor at the government hospital was kind but honest, and the waiting list for the operation is long, longer than my patience and longer than what is left of my ability to walk to the shop. A private hospital can do it soon, but soon has a price, and my monthly income does not stretch to it. So the decision made itself. Piet did not save these coins so that I would sit in a chair unable to reach the kettle while they slept under the bed. He saved them so that on some winter afternoon exactly like this one, his wife would have something solid to put her hand on.

I want to be honest that I knew almost nothing about how any of this worked. In all our married years the coins were his department, the way the vegetable garden was mine. I had never in my life understood how you even arrive at a number for a thing like this. So I sat with my daughter's old laptop, which I am slow on, and I read for two evenings the way a schoolgirl reads for an exam. I read about how you would actually Sell Krugerrands in this country, what papers you need, what the process is. It was less mysterious than I had feared and more ordinary. That ordinariness was its own small comfort.

Learning how the number is made

The thing that surprised me most, after a lifetime of not knowing, is that the value of Piet's coins was never really a secret and never really his to decide. I had somehow imagined that a man in a shop looked at a coin and named a figure out of the air. It is not like that at all. Each coin holds one ounce of gold, and there is a world price for an ounce, moving every hour of every day in a currency that is not even ours, and then it is turned into rands. On top of that sits a small premium because it is a minted coin and not just a lump. I sat there with my tea going cold and understood, for the first time, that the number is mostly made somewhere far away by people who never met my husband.

I looked up the Krugerrand price on the day I finally felt ready, and I wrote it down on the back of one of Piet's own envelopes, which felt right, him and the number together on the same brown paper. The figure was larger than he could have dreamed in 1974 when he bought the first one, and I sat with that for a while. He had been patient in a way I had not appreciated. Every quiet year he added a coin, the far away number climbed, and neither of us said a word about it over supper. His faith had been in something dull and heavy and honest, and it had held.

Letting a few go

I have decided to sell six. Not the drought year, and not the two from the year my mother died, and not 1990 with Karen's wedding written on it. Those stay. I chose the plainest ones, the years with no note, the ordinary years, because it seemed kinder somehow to part with the coins that carried no small message from him.

There is grief in it. I will not pretend there is not. Sliding six coins into a separate envelope felt like giving away six winters of his quiet care, six trips into town, six evenings when he came home and said nothing and simply provided. But there is relief threaded right through the grief, and I have stopped being ashamed of the relief. I will walk again. I will reach the kettle. I will get to the garden that has gone to weeds since he died, and I will kneel in it, because of gold he bought before I even understood what it was.

I have put the remaining envelopes back in the blue trunk, on top of the grey blanket now, where I can reach them without pulling the whole thing out. When I am healed I will write on a new envelope, in my own untidy hand, the year of my hip and the reason. It seems only fair. He kept the account all those years. The least I can do is add my one honest line to it.