The Fifty Year Tenant They Tried To Evict

He charged me 40 dollars a month that first year. When Verda passed in 1991 he raised it to 60, and he apologized for that for about a decade afterward every time he saw me, like 60 dollars was a sum I might never forgive him for. By the time Bernard himself passed this spring, at 91, I was paying 320 dollars a month for a three bedroom house on a double lot with a porch that wraps the south side, and I knew good and well what that house was worth to a man who was not Bernard Liess. I am not a fool about money. I have just never once in 50 years had a landlord who wanted me to feel the weight of it.

Bernard never raised my rent out of spite and he never once asked me to leave, not even the two years I was behind during Harlan’s last illness, not even the year the daycare lost half its families to the plant shutting down. He used to say the same thing every single time I tried to pay him what I owed him on top of what I already owed: “Hazel, you kept half this town’s children alive and fed and read to while their mothers worked. I am not going to be the man who forgets that because a few years were lean.”

I ran a licensed family daycare out of that house for 30 years. The state capped me at 10 children at a time, and I held to that number the whole way through, never once over it, because Bernard’s own granddaughter had been one of mine before she grew up and moved to Springfield, and he used to say he liked knowing exactly how many hands were on his porch rail at any given hour of the day. I had cribs in the back bedroom and a sandbox under the oak in the side yard and a rule, posted right by the door in my own handwriting, that said SHOES OFF, HEARTS ON. I raised two generations of this town’s children in that house, fed them lunch at that same kitchen table where Bernard used to sit and drink coffee black, no cream, no sugar, same as his father before him.

The lunch was always the same four things on rotation, so the mothers could pack accordingly on the days I ran short: grilled cheese cut on the diagonal, vegetable soup in the cold months, peanut butter and apple slices on Fridays, and on birthdays, whoever’s birthday it was got to pick, and most of them picked grilled cheese anyway. I kept a calendar on the icebox door in grease pencil with every child’s birthday circled, and I baked a small cake for each one, nothing fancy, just yellow cake from a box and whatever frosting I had on hand, because a child should not have to wait for a party at home to know somebody marked the day. Gaylen Nordby’s birthday stayed circled on that calendar for three straight years, and I still remember the cake he asked for a dump truck drawn on it, done with a toothpick dragged through chocolate frosting, since Chestnut Street did not run to a bakery that did custom work.