The Boy Who Gave His Summer Away

“I asked him was he sure,” Mrs. Pruitt told me, “because that is a great deal of money for a boy his age to hand over without blinking, and I wanted him to understand there was no taking it back once it posted. He said, ‘I’m sure, I earned it mowing, it’s mine to give.’ I have had grown men in that office arguing over a two dollar late fee on a field trip form. I have never had anybody, child or adult, so certain about giving away that much at once.”

Mrs. Pruitt said she had cried a little after he left her office, and that she had told him only that whoever paid an account down anonymous did happen sometimes, grown folks mostly, and he had said, “I know, that’s why nobody will think it’s me,” which she said might be the most practical sentence she had ever heard out of a sixth grader.

That was two hundred and forty dollars. Every cent he had made that whole summer, standing behind a mower in heat that put salt rings on his shirt, gone in eleven days, and he never told a soul, not his best friend Caleb, not his own daddy, who was two states over hauling a load of grain to Ohio most of that month and did not hear a word of this until after the supper either, though when he did hear it, on the phone with me the next morning, my son Curtis was quiet so long I thought the call had dropped, and then he said, “That’s my boy,” in a voice that cracked clean through, the same way Dana Dermot’s had the night before. I want that said plainly, because a boy ought to have his father in the story and not just his grandmother: Curtis was away working a job that keeps this family’s lights on, same as his daddy was away linework thirty years before him, and the first thing he did when he got home two days later was drive straight to the Dermots’ rental with a chainsaw and a truck bed full of split oak, because Roy Dermot had said offhand that the basement they were renting ran cold, and Curtis Teague does not know how to show up empty handed once he knows where to show up.

But I am ahead of myself, because the supper itself is the part you want, and I was there, so let me tell it the way it happened and not the way it sounds smoothed out afterward.

After Dana said what she said, the hall stayed quiet for what felt like a long time but was probably four seconds. Pastor Ward, who is a kind man but not always a quick one, cleared his throat and said something about how generosity like that was exactly what this church ought to be known for, and started to move the evening along toward the pie, the way pastors will do when they sense a thing has been said and does not need more said on top of it.