The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof

Two Kids And One Strange Bag

Truman is eleven, all elbows and opinions, the kind of boy who reads the almanac for fun and corrects you if you get the moon phase wrong. Winnie is eight, quieter than her brother in company and twice as loud when it is just the two of them, which is most of the time, since they have shared a room their whole lives and apparently intend to keep sharing everything else out of habit.

They arrived on a Saturday in a car packed to the ceiling with the kind of luggage that suggests two parents who packed in a hurry and a genuine belief that summer camp should include every stuffed animal a child has ever owned. Truman climbed out last, and he had, slung across one shoulder, an old canvas tool bag I recognized before he even set foot on the gravel.

It had been my husband’s. It lived in the barn on a nail by the workbench, and I had not thought about it in years, let alone noticed it was gone from where I’d last seen it hanging. Truman must have found it on one of his explorations of the barn the summer before, and something about it, the smell of it maybe, or the weight, or just the fact that it had belonged to a grandfather he barely remembered, had made it his.

I did not think much of it at first. Boys collect strange things. What I noticed, over the following weeks, was how he carried it. Not the way a child carries a favorite toy, loosely, forgetfully, left on the porch overnight without a second thought. He carried it the way a man carries a toolbox to a job he takes seriously. Into the kitchen at breakfast. Out to the garden when I put him and Winnie to work on the beans. Under his chair at supper, where more than once I caught the toe of my shoe against it and felt him go rigid across the table, as if I had touched something alive.

At the Fourth of July potluck out at the church, he kept it on his lap through the whole meal, one arm looped through the strap even while he ate his pie. At Vacation Bible School he would not put it in his cubby with the other boys’ backpacks. The teacher, a patient woman who has seen every variety of stubborn child God ever made, finally let him keep it beside his chair rather than fight him on it.

I teased him about it, the way you tease a child you love and do not yet understand. “What have you got in there, Truman, the family fortune?”

“Just stuff, Grandma.”

He would pull it closer and go quiet, and I would let it drop, because I told myself that eleven year old boys and their strange treasures are older than farmhouses. My own father, my mother used to say, kept a jackknife and a dead rabbit’s foot hidden in the bottom of a boot for the better part of a summer once, and no one ever did find out why, and the world did not end for the not knowing.

Winnie never carried a bag of her own. What she carried, I would not understand until much later, and it turned out to matter every bit as much as her brother’s.