The Boy Who Earned the Campout
I opened my mouth.
“You told me he asked you not to make it a thing,” Harvey said. “All right. Then don’t. But the boy is twelve, Trisha. He isn’t a package. If anybody in this town is going to say to Orrin Gannon how that hike could be done safely, it ought to be the one who has to walk it.”
I drove home with the radio off.
I waited until after supper. Brett was in the garage with the truck’s brake lines, and the dishes were done. Jonah was at the table with his geometry, and I sat down across from him and told him everything I had done since Thursday.
I told him which men. I told him what each one had said. I did not soften Lyle Haugen.
He listened with his pencil in his hand. When I finished, he was quiet long enough that I thought he had gone back to his homework.
“You told Mr. Bartel,” he said. “And Mr. Jaworski. And all of them.”
“I asked them a question about the oath. That’s all I asked.”
“You didn’t ask them to make Mr. Gannon do anything.”
“No.”
“Okay.” He put the pencil down. “I’m not mad. I thought I would be.” He lined up the edge of his notebook with the edge of the table. “Mom, do you know what I’d want, if I was on that hike?”
“Tell me.”
“I’d want somebody to ask me.” He said it to the notebook. “That’s what Mr. Bartel said, right? Ask first. Nobody asked. Mr. Gannon just decided, because it’s easier to decide something about a kid than to ask him a thing.”
He got up. He went upstairs without another word, and I heard his door close.
I stayed at the table. Twenty minutes went by. Brett came in and washed his hands and looked at me, and I shook my head, and he did not ask.
Then Jonah came down the stairs with the hitch in his left step, and he had an index card in his shirt pocket with the corner showing.
“I want to do it, Mom,” he said. “Wednesday, after school. At his house. He’s in his barn on Wednesdays, he’s got the snowblowers.”
“I’ll drive you.”
“And you stay in the car.” He looked at his father. “Both of you. Dad doesn’t come. Mr. Ruddick doesn’t come, and nobody calls him first. I want him to hear it from me or it’s not mine.”
Brett leaned on the doorframe. “Son, you don’t have to do this by yourself.”
“I’m not by myself.” Jonah patted his pocket. “I wrote it down.”
I asked to see what he had written. He said no. He said I could see it after.
Orrin Gannon lived on a hill road four miles out of town, in a white farmhouse with a pole barn behind it. On Wednesday evening the barn door was rolled half open and a work light was on inside. I could see a snowblower on the bench with its housing off, and a pie tin of solvent with a carburetor soaking in it, and Orrin in a canvas coat with a rag in his hand.