I turned the postcard over in the folding chair light of the library basement and read the tiny signal report on the back, the ordinary shorthand of the hams that Toivo used to scratch out at the kitchen table. Date, time, frequency. Five and nine, it said, which is as strong as a signal goes. It was signed by Urho, of Thunder Bay, and it was addressed to my husband. Brody sat in the chair beside me with his hands hanging between his knees, white as milk, waiting for me to say something.
“Grandma, how can he be getting mail?” he asked. “Grandpa is gone.” I told him the truth, as I had worked it out in my head while I read. Urho was a man of eighty four who had been a friend of Toivo for fifty years on the air, but had never once visited. He had not known that my husband died. Last Sunday he had been on our net, a guest with a new radio, and had heard the old call letters of Toivo spoken aloud on the air. They belong to me now. I speak them every week.
“He thought it was Grandpa,” Brody said slowly. “He heard the voice of an old woman on the same call and he thought the station of Grandpa was still on.” I nodded. “And he mailed a card.” I laughed, in spite of myself, and then my eyes filled. “It is still his station, honey. That is all the card says. It is the most sensible thing anyone has said about it since November.” Brody looked at the table, and his ears went red.
Then I unfolded the paper with the county seal. It was a copy of a declaration filed at the courthouse in Duluth in the winter of 1979, in the typewriter print of that time. I read it carefully, as I had read a thousand pages in my years at the switchboard. It had been signed by Toivo and witnessed by two men from the county. It recorded that in January of that year, a storm had cut off the Vermilion Range for six days, and that two amateur stations had carried the calls of the stranded.
A voice that goes out on the air in a hard hour is never lost, for somewhere in the dark another voice is always listening.
The other station had been Urho. For six days, my husband and a stranger in Ontario had passed messages back and forth about insulin and fuel and a woman in labor on County Road 21, with no light but a kerosene lamp. After the storm, the county asked Toivo to promise that his tower would always serve in an emergency, and he had put it in writing. At the bottom were three numbered clauses. I read the third one out loud in the dim room, and my voice went hoarse on it.
“The tower and the station shall pass in trust to whoever keeps the Sunday net alive, and shall not be sold or removed so long as they serve the public in time of need.” I put the paper down. Brody was staring at me. “That is why Grandpa never answered when you asked,” I said gently. “He could not have sold it if he wanted to. And neither could I. And neither, honey, could you.” He put his face in his hands. My students had stopped even pretending to study.
“I was going to pull it down,” Brody said, through his fingers. “I had the trailer. I had a guy coming.” His voice shook. “It would have been against the law. I would have destroyed the one thing Grandpa did that mattered.” I reached over and rubbed his shoulder, as I used to when he was seven and fell off the swing. “But you did not,” I said. “You came to the library. You are sitting in my class.” He laughed, wetly, and wiped his nose on his sleeve.
I told the class to take a break. We went upstairs and had coffee from the machine, Brody and I, in plastic cups, at a table by the window. He asked me what the exam was like. He asked how a person got a call sign and what it meant. Slowly, with the air of a boy venturing into a cold lake, he asked if there was room in my next class for one more. I told him there was a waiting list. Then I told him that for family, I would make an exception.
Brody passed his Technician exam in February, with the highest score in the room, and Kayla sat in the back row and held his coat. In March, Urho himself came down from Thunder Bay in a snowstorm, with his daughter driving, and stood in the garage beside the old chair of Toivo with his hand on the radio and tears running into his beard. The two of them, the old man and the young one, spent that whole weekend on the air, talking to men across four states.
The repeater of the county still sits at the top of the tower, and the check of three hundred and ten dollars still arrives. I use it to buy radios for the library class. We now have fourteen students in the course for beginners and a waiting list that runs to summer. On Sunday nights, I sit in the chair of Toivo with the headphones around my neck, and Brody sits on the stool beside me, writing in the logbook. He logs every contact in square capital letters, as his grandfather did.
When the net opens, I key the microphone, and I say the call letters, and I wait. The answers come back one after another, out of the dark, from Fargo and Thunder Bay and a trailer in Marquette. Then, last of all, comes a young voice, clear and a little shy, saying a new call and my name. I close my eyes. It turns out there is somebody on the other end of that thing who wants to talk to an old lady. There are, in fact, a great many.
