Corrections

In thirty-one years at the Tillbrook Courier, I have let exactly zero errors run. This is not a boast. It is the only thing I own.

I sit at the copy desk under the broken clock. I read what other people write and I fix it. Their “its” and “it’s.” Their “reign” and “rein.” Their mayors, who are always “beloved” and never, as far as I can tell, loved. I also type up the obituaries, which come in from the funeral homes, and I treat those the hardest, because the one thing nobody forgives is a dead person’s name spelled wrong.

The fax machine is in the corner. It has not been connected to a phone line since 2009. We kept it because the cord was bolted to the wall and nobody wanted to be the one to pry it off.

The first one came in on a Tuesday, a little after six. I was alone, and the machine made the noise a fax machine makes, that cheap, rising shriek, and then it printed one page and stopped. The page was an obituary, the way funeral homes send them: name, age, a paragraph of survivors, a line about the casseroles. It was for Walter Brandt, the postmaster. Walter Brandt was fifty-nine and in good health and had mailed me a birthday card two weeks earlier. The obituary said he had “passed suddenly at the post office on the morning of Thursday.”

There was an error in it. The survivors section said “his wife, Dolores.” Walter’s wife was Doreen.

I corrected it. I do not know why. It is a reflex, like catching a glass. I crossed out Dolores and wrote Doreen above it in red and set the page on the corner of my desk and went home and did not sleep.

Walter Brandt died on Thursday morning at the post office. A stroke, at the counter, in front of a woman buying stamps.

I kept the page. When the funeral home sent the real obituary the next day, it had “Doreen” in it, and “passed suddenly,” and the word “Thursday,” and I compared the two for a long time with a ruler and I could not find a difference.

After that they came whenever they came. A retired judge. A man who ran the bait shop. A girl who had been to my church. Each page arrived on the dead machine with its small shriek, each a day or two before the event, and each had a mistake in it. A wrong middle initial. A misplaced comma that made a man seem to have died of his dog. I corrected them, because I cannot not, and I noticed something I did not want to notice. Correcting a page never saved anyone. The people died on the day the page said, in the place the page said, and only the typos changed. I have come to think the errors were the only part of each page that was still undecided.

I said nothing to anyone. Who would I tell? The editor thinks a fax machine is a type of cat.

On a Monday in October the machine woke up again at ten past six. The page curled out slowly. I read the name, and then I read the age, and then I read the paragraph twice, because I was looking for the mistake.

It said Marsh, Odile, fifty-eight, of Tillbrook, a copy editor at the Courier for thirty-one years. Survivors: a sister. It said she had “died at her desk, in the evening, of causes that were not unexpected.”

I am sixty-two.

I sat holding the page for some time. I thought about every person I had corrected. I thought about what a correction is: a small door, held open, through which the true thing walks in. And I thought, with a clarity I do not usually enjoy, that I had been handed an error in my favor. The page said I died at fifty-eight. I was already sixty-two. As written, it could never come true, and I had only to leave it alone.

I put the page in the drawer, unmarked. I did not write on it. I did not even use the pencil.

I have gone to work every day since. I am careful on the stairs. I do not sit up late. The sister calls on Sundays, and I do not tell her anything, and I have started doing the crossword in ink.

This morning, a little before six, the machine woke up one more time. It printed a short page, three lines, set in the plain eight-point type we use at the bottom of page two.

“CORRECTION: An obituary of Ms. Odile Marsh stated her age as 58. She was 62. The Courier regrets the error.”

I have read it a great many times. I cannot find the mistake. I do not think it is the kind of mistake that gets found. I think it is the kind that gets fixed.