The Boy Who Emptied His Piggy Bank

He did not make a speech. Wendell Cutter is not built for speeches. He set the bike down on its kickstand in our gravel drive, looked at Hollis, and said, “Heard you gave up something to buy this for somebody else. Figured this town owed you the difference.” Then he took a folded piece of paper out of his shirt pocket, and it was a receipt, showing that half of Bethel Grove, people I never even knew had heard about the offering plate, had chipped in the rest of what that bike cost, five and ten dollars at a time, over three weeks, without a single one of them saying a word to me or to Hollis about it.

My son did not say thank you right away. He does not, when something is too big for him, he goes quiet in a different way than his ordinary quiet, a kind of stillness that scares me a little because it looks so much like his father used to look, working something over before he’d speak on it. He walked up to that bike. He put both hands on the handlebars. And then he looked up at Wendell Cutter and said, clear enough that I heard every word from the porch, “Can you teach me? My dad was going to.”

Wendell Cutter is seventy one years old and has not, to anyone’s knowledge, ridden a bicycle since the Eisenhower administration. He said yes anyway. And that is how my son learned to ride a bike on the gravel road past the Yoder place on a cold Saturday in late November, with a hardware store owner jogging alongside holding the seat, both of them laughing in a way I had not heard out of Hollis in two years, while I stood at the end of our drive with my coat pulled tight and cried the kind of tears that do not hurt on the way out.

The McAllisters moved into their new house eleven days before Christmas. The whole town turned out for it, more people than that house could comfortably hold, spilling out onto a porch still smelling of fresh cut lumber. Cora found Hollis in the crowd before anyone else did. She did not say much either. She just took his hand and pulled him inside to see her new room, and the two of them sat on her bedroom floor while grown adults filled the rest of the house with noise, and neither one of them needed to say a word to know exactly what the other one meant by being there.