Daytimer

There is a pitching change, and the seventeen-year-old calling the ball game has forty seconds to fill. She fills it off the county's minutes: the board passed the road levy two to one in August, and the one was Commissioner Rolland Woodring. It goes out on a thousand watts of daylight, three weeks before the election.

Woodring telephones the next day. He is not angry. He is certain, and so is half the county: a station that puts a candidate on the air owes him equal time. Marlys will not answer out of her own head. She is going to go look at what the station ran, all of it, since May.

The first of August, and Marlys Rutledge is building September the way she has built every month for thirty-three years — a day at a time, in pencil. She gets to the ninth, goes to put the co-op's fall run at the end of the day, and the hour is written full. She moves them to noon, marks the margin, and goes on to the tenth.

The card taped inside the control-room door carries twelve figures, one to a month: the minute this station comes off. September's is earlier than August's, the way it is earlier every year. The orders live in a drawer out front and the card lives on a door one room away, and nobody ever decided that.

She finds it on the fourth. She tells the woman who sold it on the sixteenth.

Thurman Volk stands at the front-office counter a good while before he gets around to what he came in for, which is how the county does business and how Marlys Rutledge prefers it. The spraying notices, same as last year, start moved a week. She reads it where it lies and puts it in the log.

The station has been granted two more hours. Eight o'clock to ten, and they go the way two hours go: a hundred and six minutes of a ball game, fourteen minutes of road names. A hundred and six and fourteen is a hundred and twenty, and a hundred and twenty minutes is two hours. At ten o'clock the two hours are up and there is nothing behind them.

Nothing at the station breaks. Nothing is on order and nothing needs restoring. That is not the problem.

The first working day of February, and Marlys Rutledge writes sixty spots on the Yarbrough Irrigation order the way it has been sixty spots since before she was the one signing it. It goes east in the box on the road at a quarter past three.

It comes back inside the week, flattened out and signed by Lucille Ludden in the place her name goes. Nothing is crossed out. The count is the same, the lengths are the same, the schedule still starts after the noon news. One line is different. On the plant's own cream-colored sheet, the line that says how the account will be paid now says it is settled in trade against the plant's shop.

There is nothing wrong with that. Half the county pays somebody in something, and this is a payment term on signed paper: welding, fabrication, steel, a service truck with a man on it. It only does not go where money goes. A hundred and ninety people work out east, and at four in the afternoon the lot is full to the fence.

Two sheets come in one envelope from the Verlin school board. The first is the notice of a special session, a Monday evening in March, on the question both boards have agreed to put to the voters of both districts on the twenty-sixth. Marlys Rutledge reads it cold off the board's own paper. The second sheet she does not read. She lays it on the front-office desk and squares the community calendar on top of it.

No board has asked the station for anything. Nobody will complain if K-V-Y-T gives the two districts nothing, and nobody will complain if it gives one of them twice what it gives the other, because there is nothing for anybody to complain against. Which makes it hers.

Out at the transmitter at two in the morning, a man has the remote link out of its cases on a towel with the screws in a jar lid, putting new ends on two cables, because if one evening sounds thinner than the other somebody will say the thin one got the worse treatment.