The Porch I Swept for My Neighbor

The fortieth morning

The fortieth morning was the eleventh of November, a Wednesday.

I woke at four with my knees stiff and my hands cold under the quilt. There was a feeling in the house of something about to happen, though I could not have told you what. The weather had turned in the night. When I stood at the kitchen window with my coffee, the grass in the yard was white and every blade stood separate. The first hard frost.

I had made a pot of beef and barley soup the night before, and a pan of cornbread. I wrapped the bowl in the towel and put the cornbread in a tin. I took the broom from the garage and walked across the yard, and each step crunched, and my breath hung in front of me in the dark.

It was ten minutes to six.

I came around the corner of the house with the broom over my shoulder, and I stopped.

The porch light was on.

In forty days that light had never once been on at that hour. I had come every morning by feel, and I had grown used to the black square of that house.

And the front door, which had been shut for forty days, was standing open.

The screen was latched back with the hook, and the inside door stood wide, and through it I could see the hall, and the kitchen beyond it, and the kitchen light.

I thought: he has fallen. That was the old woman’s fear I had carried all those weeks and never said aloud.

I set the broom down. I climbed the steps with the soup in both hands.

“Clifton?” I said.

My voice came out thin. Frost on the top step snapped under my boot.

“Clifton, it’s Lorraine.”

And from the far end of the porch, from the corner by the rail where the rocker sits, where the lamp does not reach, a voice said, “I know who it is.”

I nearly dropped the soup.

He was in the rocker. He had been sitting there in the dark the whole time, in his work coat and a wool cap, with a blanket over his knees, and a mug of something in both hands that had stopped steaming a long time ago. I had not seen him because the rocker was in the shadow, and because I was not expecting to see him anywhere.

“I’ve been out here since four,” Clifton Bartels said. “I wasn’t sure you’d come. It’s a cold one.”

I said, “I didn’t want to bother you.”

“I know that too,” he said.

He did not get up. He looked at me for a long moment, a tall, gray, worn man, thinner than he had been in the summer, with his hands wrapped around the mug and his eyes red at the rims. He had shaved. I noticed that. There was a nick on his jaw with a scrap of tissue on it.

“You’d better sit down, Lorraine,” he said. “I have a thing to say, and I’ve been practicing it for three weeks, and I’m not going to get through it if you stand there holding that soup.”