The House That Rolled Past His Gate

What happened at Lonnie’s

I didn’t hear from my brother that day. I heard about him from everybody else.

Jeff from the plant had driven out at noon to measure for curtains.

He found a flat gravel spot with a capped water line and four dents in the ground where the blocks had been. He asked Lonnie where the trailer was.

People told me Lonnie stood there in the field and said, “My sister took it.” And Jeff said, “Took it? It was hers?” And Lonnie said, “I reckon it was.”

Jeff wanted his deposit back. Lonnie gave it back to him that evening.

That was six hundred fifty dollars he did not have, and he paid it the same day, and I want to say that for him. Lonnie never stiffed a man in his life.

By Wednesday the whole county knew. By Thursday a man at the feed store asked Lonnie if he’d lost a house.

Somebody at the plant taped a toy trailer to his locker. I hated that part. I never wanted my brother laughed at. I only wanted to keep what was mine.

I’ll tell you the truth. I lay awake that week. I worried I’d done to him in public what he had done to me in private.

I prayed on it every night. I asked the Lord if I had been proud.

Pam

The next Thursday evening, about six, a car pulled up in my new gravel drive.

Hollis’s crew had put the deck back on and set the steps, but the skirting wasn’t on yet and the house sat up on its piers like it was standing on tiptoe.

It was Pam. She got out of her car, and she went around to the back and opened the trunk. She stood there a minute. Then she reached in and lifted out Daddy’s porch swing.

Lonnie had taken it down off the deck in September, right after my letter. I had wondered where it went. I hadn’t asked. It was the one piece of that house that was his.

Pam carried it up my new steps by herself, the chains clanking, and set it down on the deck boards. She was out of breath. She is not a big woman.

“Cheryl,” she said. “I didn’t know the title was yours. I didn’t know Daddy Roy signed it over. Lonnie didn’t know either, not the paper. I swear to you.”

I said, “I believe you, Pam.”

“He thought it was part of the land,” she said. “He thought it was the farm’s. And we’re behind, Cheryl. We’re so far behind. I got laid off in May. He’s been working every double they’ll give him, and it’s still not enough. He promised that trailer to that boy because he didn’t know what else to do.”

She sat down on the edge of the deck and put her face in her hands. I sat down next to her. We were quiet for a while. Earl’s cows were bawling across the road.

“I should have told you about the paper,” I said. “I could have shown him in April. I let him find out in front of the whole county.”

“He’d have argued with a paper,” Pam said. “You know he would. He couldn’t argue with a house going down the road.”

Then she laughed, a wet, tired laugh, and I laughed too. We sat there laughing on my deck with Daddy’s swing lying on its side between us.

Before she left, I told her the health department had an opening for a front desk clerk. Full time, county benefits, starting in November.

I told her I’d put in a word with my supervisor. She looked at me like I’d handed her a hundred dollar bill.

“Why would you do that for us?” she said.

“Because you’re my sister,” I said. “And because Daddy would’ve already done it.”