The Second Opinion — Summary

The spike is a sixteen-penny nail driven up through a block of walnut, and the walnut is a piece of somebody’s stair tread. It has been on this desk through four editors. What is on it this morning is a dentist’s card from 2023, a raffle ticket for a gun the Ruritans gave away in April, and a receipt for two tires.

The delinquent tax list arrives at six, assembled, reconciled against the treasurer’s roll, formatted to the column width the paper has used since it went from eight columns to six. The county has to publish it and the paper is where it gets published.

At 6:12 the paper holds one line. It does not remove it and it does not object. It holds it and puts a note against it saying the name has appeared in this paper sixty-one times since 1981 and that four of the last five were the hospice benefit at the Rich Valley fire hall in June.

The hold is not a judgment about the tax. It is a paper that has printed the man’s name sixty-one times.

At 7:40 Bluefield releases it. Its note says the list prints as received, that this paper omitted names in 1997 and again in 2004 and what came of both, and that the paper cannot leave one name off without deciding which hardships are the kind that get you left off, in a county where those decisions will not fall evenly. Wade Rasnake has made a version of that argument himself, in Roanoke, to a man who disagreed with him. The paper holds it again at 7:52. By nine the line has moved four times and nobody in the building has touched it once.

They are at it every week. The paper runs all nineteen of Elva Ketron’s survivors and Bluefield trims at ten. Bluefield names the Chilhowie girl who served eleven straight and the paper will not name a freshman in a losing set, any freshman, ever. Bluefield catches two real errors in a boundary description.

At a quarter past one Wade takes the truck through the wash on Route 11 and sits in it. The list has been public since six in two other places, and whatever runs tomorrow is not the disclosure. And if both of them had said print, it would have printed, and he would have felt something for about nine seconds and gone on to the classifieds.

He calls Danette Sluss at ten past four. She already knows and has for eleven days. She thanks him and does not think the call did anything, and she is right.

Between them the two have the whole of it. What neither has is the other one’s note.

The list runs entire. At six he prints the 6:12 note on a half sheet and pushes it down onto the nail with his thumb.