He’s too busy cussing because he’s gone.

And with good reason. Kevin headed the Rowan Public Library’s history room for five years before he left last week to become a local history consultant with the state library — and Gardiner is the history room assistant.

Until the library replaces Kevin, it’s in his hands. And he was at a genealogy conference in Alabama during Kevin’s last few days on the job, when — suddenly — his desk got piled full of all kinds of things people had planned to bring to the library and had forgotten about.

“It was messy,” Gardiner says. Things were everywhere.

But Kevin got it cleaned up and Gardiner went to his conference, and then the last day came — and the avalanche.

People had read Kathy Chaffin’s “Tuesday People” story about Kevin and realized he was leaving and, bingo!

Sybil Efird brought in a picture of herself and her husband, the late Rev. Frank Efird, and Glenn and Addie Ketner when they went to England for the 700th anniversary of Salisbury Cathedral and met the Queen Mother — and a picture of St. John’s Lutheran congregation meeting them at the depot when they came back.

Someone brought in a patch from the National Sportscasters and Sportswriters Hall of Fame.

Virginia Peeler showed up with the last scrapbook of the now-extinct Pine Tree Garden Club.

Bobby Petrea brought a picture of the Confederate Veterans Reunion in Salisbury that took place before 1914, when his great-grandfather, Samuel Beverly “Bev” Colley, died. His grandfather wore the bullets that wounded him four times dangling from his watch chain.

That picture was taken in front of Salisbury Graded School, which became Frank B. John and is now the office of Rowan-Salisbury Schools. Things change.

“I tried to spend all day copying pictures” for the library files, Kevin said at the end of that day. Pictures of former city schools Superintendent Jack Knox and former Salisbury Mayor Clifford Peeler.

“We’re getting more and more questions about photos,” Kevin said.

Janet Carpenter brought a postcard of a young St. John’s.

Patsy Flint brought daughter Kelly’s new CD, “Unauthorized,” — “and it’s great!” But who had time to really listen?

Margaret Kluttz brought Draft Liddy campaign stuff, and Bill Stanback arrived with a pamphlet the library didn’t have about Marshal Ney — and pictures of a German submarine that his WWII ship sank. It happened on his first day out on his first convoy and within 12 hours of New York City.

And there was more.

Joe Fountain of Charlotte came with a list that David Alexander Atwell of Salisbury had compiled in 1886 of his comrades in the Civil War. As one by one they died, he noted the dates on the list. And someone else noted beside his name: “Joined fellow soldiers Christmas Eve, 1922.”

A Mormon Church scrapbook appeared on Kevin’s desk, and a Rowan County employee card (his own) and an old newspaper that the history room already had on film. But Kevin didn’t throw it all away. He cut out an ad for Derno, the great magician, who was going to appear at the Meroney Theater on Thursday, Dec. 1, 1910, and dropped it in the Meroney file.

But another old newspaper — the Salisbury Daily Sun for March 19, 1901 — that the history room didn’t have upset him.

Kevin was tired when a man stepped into his office, paper in hand. Tired and wondering where he could go eat that night or the next day and beg — or steal — a menu. Menus are history, and he’s collected about 20 for the history room during his five years here, but now, leaving, he felt an urgency to add another, and maybe another ...

His desk was loaded. How was he going to get it all handled before he left?

And he felt so sure the library already had that Daily Sun on microfilm that he gestured to a place to put it, and the man left.

Then he asked volunteer June Watson to check that it was on film.

It wasn’t!

“Grab that man!” Kevin shouted, but the man was gone.

“I didn’t even get his name,” he wailed. “I’m afraid I didn’t act very nice.”

But the library has the paper, and the paper is history, and maybe somebody will read this and know who he was and tell him it was important.

All those things all those people dropped on Kevin Cherry’s desk on his last day as head of the history room are important.

“History,” he always said, “is always happening.” And he could never save enough of the history Rowan County was throwing away, the record of life as it was lived in this place at any time, the stories that tie one unto another and generation unto generation, and help us all know — and trust — each other.

Gardiner knows it, too.

“I do miss him,” he admits. “He did so much. He’ll be hard to be replaced.”