The Farmhouse We Painted in Nine Days

The Rail

He came back three Saturdays in a row.

The first Saturday, he took the old rail down and the two posts under it. The posts were rotted at the bottom where water had stood for years. He showed me, poking a screwdriver into the wood like it was cake.

The second Saturday, he set new posts in concrete and let them cure. He brought his own lumber, treated pine, and wouldn’t let me pay for a stick of it.

The third Saturday, he built the rail. He did it the old way, with a hand plane on the top rail so it was smooth enough for a child to run her hand along. He fit the balusters one at a time, each one checked with a level.

Wyatt sat on the steps and watched him the whole morning. Ed did not talk much, but along about eleven o’clock he handed Wyatt a hammer and a little bag of finishing nails and showed him how to set one.

“Not like you’re mad at it,” Ed said. “Like you’re telling it where to go.”

Wyatt drove three nails crooked and the fourth one straight. Ed told him the fourth one was the one that counted.

When the rail was done, Ed stood back and looked at it. It was the straightest thing on that porch, maybe the straightest thing in the county.

“That’ll hold,” he said. “That’ll hold a long time.”

I made him take a pie home. Cherry. He tried to say no and I would not let him.

At the end of May I heard from Mrs. Ward at church that Ed had rented the Cherokee Street house to a young Guard family whose husband was going out with the next rotation. Eight hundred a month. A little less than we had paid.

I heard from Walt, who heard from the Legion treasurer, that Ed had written the post a check that summer, and that it was a big one, and that the memo line said Danny.

I never said a word to anybody about any of it. I didn’t need to. In a town of five thousand people, the truth has a way of walking around on its own.

Ten Months

The rest of the year was just the year.

I worked my three days a week at the bank. The school bus picked the kids up at the Talley mailbox at 7:10 every morning, and Addie made sure Wyatt had his backpack and his lunch and both shoes. My dad came by most evenings to check the propane and stand in the kitchen and drink coffee and not talk.

We video-called Josh on Sundays when the connection held. He would make me carry the phone through every room so he could see the paint. He had helped Grandpa Roy haul hay out of that barn when we were dating.

“Show me the barn,” he’d say, every time. So I would walk out with the phone, and hold it up to the south wall, and he would look at Addie’s letters for a long time without saying anything.

The porch light went on every night. Addie saw to it. Some nights I forgot, and it would be on anyway. She had snuck down to check.

In October the FFA kids came back to help Dad and me put the garden to bed. In November the Methodist women brought a Thanksgiving dinner out because they said I’d done enough cooking.