The Summer Truman Saved For My Roof

Page after page of it. A boy’s whole summer, tallied in a child’s handwriting, adding up in the margin every few entries the way you do when you are eleven and cannot yet trust a total unless you have checked it three times.

Somewhere in the middle of the notebook, in smaller writing squeezed between two other entries as if he had added it later and did not want to waste a clean line on it, he had written: Told Winnie the plan. She said yes right away. That was all, but I understood, reading it, that some quiet decision had passed between the two of them on an ordinary afternoon I had no idea was extraordinary, and that from that point on I had been outnumbered in my own house without ever knowing it.

The last entry, dated three days before they left, read simply: Three hundred and twelve dollars. Enough, I think. Ask Winnie for the rest.

Winnie’s Page

Tucked in the very back of the notebook, in handwriting rounder and looser than her brother’s, still learning where its letters wanted to lean, was one more page. Winnie’s.

She had not earned money the way Truman had. She was eight, and there is only so much an eight year old can do for pay in a township this size. What she had done instead, in her own accounting of it, was everything that let her brother go earn his. She had watered the tomatoes on the days he mowed, so I would not notice him gone longer than a chore should take. She had kept me talking on the porch on two separate afternoons, by her own careful description, so he could sneak the coffee tin out to the barn and back without my catching him at it. She had given him, and this was underlined twice, all seven dollars and forty cents of her own saved up birthday money, because, in her words, a roof is for both of us too.

At the bottom of her page, she had drawn the farmhouse in crayon, a lopsided little house with a brown roof and no leak in it anywhere, and underneath it she had written, in the biggest letters on the page: WE FIXED IT SO YOU DON’T HAVE TO WORRY ANYMORE.

I sat on that bare mattress for a long moment with a child’s drawing of a whole roof in my lap, and I will tell you plainly that I was not able to do anything but cry.