The Boy Who Gave His Summer Away

“Whoever you are,” Dana said, and her voice broke clean in half, “you kept my son from being the boy at school with the old coat. You kept him from being ashamed. I don’t care if you never tell me your name. I just need you to know what you did.”

Wyatt slid down in his folding chair so far and so fast that his chin nearly hit the table edge, and I put my hand on his shoulder, and that was the moment half the room turned to look at us, because grandmothers cannot keep their faces still when their hearts are doing what mine was doing right then.

But to understand how a twelve year old boy came to be sitting in that chair with two hundred and forty dollars worth of secret sitting on his conscience, you have to go back to June, to a boy with a push mower and a coffee can, and a grandmother who thought she already knew everything there was to know about him.

Wyatt had started mowing lawns the summer he turned eleven, the summer before this one, with an old Toro that Dale had pulled out of our pole barn and gone over blade, belt, and spark plug until it ran like something twice its age had no right to run. Dale is seventy and was a lineman for the rural electric cooperative for thirty one years before he retired, and there is not a small engine in Henry County he cannot get running again, and he taught Wyatt to check the oil before every job and to never, ever mow wet grass, because wet grass clumps and chokes a mower and a boy who ruins his equipment in July has no business in August.

The two of them spent a whole Saturday that first spring out in the pole barn with the Toro flipped up on two cinder blocks, Dale talking Wyatt through a carburetor cleaning the same patient way he used to walk new linemen through a bucket truck inspection, and by the end of the afternoon Wyatt could name every part he had touched. Dale does not hand a boy a running mower. He hands him a mower that does not run yet and the tools to make it run, and then he stands back with his arms crossed and lets the boy get frustrated before he says a word. That is how Dale taught Curtis, and his own father taught him, and I have long since stopped trying to talk any of the Teague men out of doing it that slow, backward way, because it works.