The Fifty Year Tenant They Tried To Evict
The house itself kept its own record of all those years, the way houses do when nobody has the money or the heart to erase it. There is a scuff low on the kitchen doorframe from a parade of small shoes learning to walk through it, and a water stain on the ceiling of the back bedroom from the year the roof went during an ice storm and Bernard sent a man out before he even asked me how I planned to pay for it. There is a pencil line on the inside of the pantry door, dozens of them really, one for every summer I measured a child against the frame before she went home for the season and came back the following spring taller than the mark I had made, and some of those children came back grown enough to bring their own children to stand against that same door. The sandbox is gone now, filled in years ago when the state tightened its rules on outdoor equipment I could no longer afford to replace, but the oak that shaded it is not gone, and neither is the hook by the door where thirty years of small jackets hung in a row too short to reach the floor.
Sabrina Wills herself has a picture somewhere, her mother kept it, of a four year old Sabrina asleep on my front room rug during nap time with four other children lined up beside her on quilts I had sewn myself out of Harlan’s old work shirts, because a lineman’s shirts outlast almost anything, including the man who wore them. I used to tell new mothers, when they stood on this same porch worried about leaving a baby with a stranger, that I had buried my own mother’s quilts into those naps, and that their children would sleep under the same hands that raised me. Most of them cried a little the first morning and then never again after that, because a house settles into a person the same way a person settles into a house, slow, and then all at once, the way everything in a life worth keeping tends to happen.
My husband Harlan climbed poles for the rural electric cooperative for 31 years, through two ice storms that took the whole county dark for a week at a time, and he died 8 years ago of a heart that finally quit on him the way hearts do to linemen who spend their whole lives on a bucket truck in the cold. He is not here to tell me what to do about a piece of paper taped to our door. I have had to learn to decide things on my own, and I am slower at it than I used to be, but I am not as slow as some people seem to think a 74 year old widow ought to be.
“Did you call anybody?” Sabrina asked me.
“Not yet.”
“Are you going to call a lawyer?”