The House That Rolled Past His Gate

A mile and a half

It took Hollis forty minutes to go a mile and a half.

He went around the curve at Earl’s hay field so slow I could have walked beside it. The pilot car stopped the one car that came the other way.

Earl was standing at his mailbox in his overalls and a flannel shirt when we came over the rise. He took his cap off as the house went by.

He was the second man that morning to do that, and both of them did it for Daddy, I think.

Hollis backed the house onto the new gravel pad in three tries, and on the third one the crew whistled, and he climbed down out of the cab and wiped his hands on a rag and walked straight past me to the front door.

He went in. I followed him. We stood in the kitchen together.

Daddy’s cup was sitting on the windowsill exactly where I left it. The water was a half inch below the rim. There wasn’t a drop on the sill. Not one.

“Well,” Hollis said, real quiet. “There you go.”

I picked the cup up with both hands, and I sat down on the kitchen floor with my back against the cabinets, and I cried like a little girl.

Hollis stood at the sink and looked out the window at Earl’s hay field and let me do it. He didn’t say a word. He didn’t have to.

When I got up, I poured that water on the little cedar tree Earl had already planted by my new steps. I don’t know why. It just seemed like the place it ought to go.