The Farmhouse We Painted in Nine Days

The Man With the Box of Tools

Ed Deckard came out on the second Saturday in April.

I saw the gray Silverado turn in off the county road from the kitchen window. I was rolling out a pie crust for Sunday, and I had flour to my elbows. I wiped my hands on my jeans and went out on the porch, and I told Addie to keep the little ones inside.

He parked behind my van and sat in the truck for a minute before he got out. When he did, he had an envelope in one hand and a red metal toolbox in the other.

“Kayla,” he said.

“Ed.”

He came up to the bottom of the porch steps and stopped. He held out the envelope. “Your deposit,” he said. “All of it. Eight-fifty. You left that house cleaner than you got it.”

I took it. I did not open it. “Thank you.”

He stood there. The wind came across the wheat and moved the hair under his cap. He looked up at the house, at the new white paint, at the blue curtains in Wyatt’s window, at the porch rail on the north end where it still sagged.

“That rail’s going to go,” he said.

“Dad’s going to get to it.”

“Your daddy’s got a bad shoulder.” He set the toolbox down on the bottom step. “I could do it.”

I did not say anything. I have learned that sometimes the kindest thing you can do for a man who has come to say something is to let the quiet sit there until he says it.

“Walt Simms came and found me at the coffee counter at the Pancake House,” Ed said. “Three Tuesdays ago. In front of everybody.”

“I didn’t send him.”

“I know you didn’t. That’s the worst part.” He took off his cap and turned it around in his hands. “He didn’t yell. He just told me what the Legion did out here. The well. The paint. The ag kids. Then he said he’d known me forty years, and he’d never been ashamed to know me till that week.”

I waited.

“Cherokee Street’s been empty since you left,” Ed said. “Nobody’s going to pay twelve hundred for that house. You were right. I knew you were right when I said it.” He looked down at the cap. “That’s not what I came to say, though.”

“What did you come to say, Ed?”

He looked at me for a long time. Then he sat down on the second porch step, slowly, like his knees were bothering him, and put the cap on the step beside him.

“I had a boy,” he said. “Danny. You wouldn’t remember him. He’d have been about forty-two this year.”

I didn’t remember him. I was eleven when it happened.

“He was in the Army. Fort Hood. He got two weeks’ leave at Christmas, oh-six, and he drove straight through to get home. Didn’t stop. Wanted to surprise his mother.” Ed’s voice did not change at all. That was the hardest part to listen to. “He fell asleep on Highway 75, twelve miles south of here. Crossed the center line. Hit nobody but a bridge abutment, thank God. Just himself.”

“Ed,” I said. “I’m so sorry.”

“His mother never got over it. She passed in 2015.” He picked a bit of dried paint off the step with his thumbnail.

“I been hard on every soldier family that’s rented from me for twenty years. I know I have. Every time I see one of those boys in his uniform at the Walmart, I get mad.

“Not at him. At the whole thing. At the Army for giving Danny leave and the road for being long and him for being twenty-two and stupid. And I take it out on whoever’s standing in front of me with a rent check.”

He looked up at me then.

“That was you,” he said. “That was Josh. And you all never did a thing to me but fix my gutters.”

I sat down on the step above him. I didn’t touch him. Ed Deckard is not a man you touch. But I sat close enough that he would know I wasn’t going anywhere.

“I don’t know how to make that right,” he said.

“You already started,” I said. “You drove out here.”

“That’s not enough.”

“No,” I said. “It’s not. But it’s a start.”

He nodded slowly. Then he stood up, picked up the red toolbox, and walked down to the north end of the porch where the rail sagged.