Which is more time than I ever gave Walter Strand in one sitting, in two years and eight months of knowing him, and about four and a half times what I gave him on the last Tuesday of his life.

In my coat pocket there were four pages of lined yellow paper folded around a certified copy of a marriage certificate in a plastic sleeve, which is where they still are.

Six hundred and eleven times, in one county, over twenty-seven years, that man’s name went into a box beside the word WITNESS.

Once, for twenty-one days, at the very end, it went beside a different one.

And I have thought, more than once, that he knew exactly what he was doing when he picked the word — that a man who had filled in ten thousand of those forms knew precisely which box he was finally standing in.