The Boy Who Brought The Coats Back

Earl and the boots

I could not have done any of it without Earl.

Earl was my husband, forty-one years, until we lost him three springs ago. He drove a propane truck in the cold months and he worked the sale barn on Saturdays, and he was not a man who said much about feelings.

But Earl took up the boots.

I would come home and tell him I had six children needing boots and nothing on the shelf, and Earl would not say a word. He would just put his cap on and go out, and a few days later there would be eight pairs of boots in the mudroom, good ones, broken in but sound, and I never asked where every pair came from. I think half of them he bought new with his own money and scuffed up on purpose so no child would feel singled out by a shiny new boot.

Once he came home from the sale barn with a whole feed sack of coats, winter coats, every one of them clean. A man there had a daughter who had grown up and moved to the city and left a closet behind, and Earl had stood in that man’s yard and loaded them into our truck himself.

He carried them in and set them on the kitchen table and he said, “That ought to hold Nadine’s rich kids over for a while.” That was his joke. He called them my rich kids, the children who had the least. It was his way of saying he was proud, without saying it.

When the arthritis started getting into my hands, it was Earl who threaded the needles for me at the kitchen table at night so I could keep sewing the tags in. He would sit under the lamp with his reading glasses down on his nose, licking the thread and poking it through, a whole row of needles stuck in a bar of soap, ready for me. A man who could back a propane truck up a quarter mile of ice, threading needles so his wife could label coats for children he would never meet.

I think about that now and I have to stop a minute.

When Earl passed, the hardest winter was not the funeral. It was that first January after, when I went to the closet to sort the new coats in and there was nobody at the kitchen table that night to thread the needles. I did it myself, slow, under the same lamp, and I talked to him the whole time like he was still there. I expect he was.

Twenty-two winters of children

I want to tell you about some of the children, because they are the whole reason the closet mattered, and because a person forgets numbers but never forgets faces.

There was a little girl named Brenda who came to the window every October for six years running, always for her younger brothers, never for herself. She would stand there and recite their sizes off the top of her head, this one needs a ten, this one needs a six, and I would load her up, and only on the last year did I finally get a coat onto her own back, a red one, by telling her it would not fit any of the boys so she might as well take it.

There were the Hadley twins, who came to school one December in matching coats so thin you could read a newspaper through them, and who left that afternoon in matching coats off my rail, green, because they would not take different colors.

There was a boy who came early one morning before the buses even ran, and knocked on the kitchen door where I was starting the ovens, and asked could he please have a coat before the other kids got there, because he did not want anybody to see. I gave him a brown one and I never said a word to a living soul, and he nodded at me in the hall for the next four years like we shared a secret, which we did.