The House That Rolled Past His Gate

Saturday

That Saturday morning I was out at seven with a cup of coffee, trying to figure out how to start the skirting by myself.

Hollis’s crew had left me the vinyl panels and the track, but the ground on the low corner needed leveling first, and I didn’t have anything but a shovel.

I heard the tractor before I saw it. Daddy’s old Ford, the one Lonnie bought with the farm.

It came up the county road at a crawl with a box blade on the back, and Lonnie was in the seat in his tan work jacket.

He turned into my drive without a word. He dropped the box blade at the low corner and leveled it in six passes, perfect, the way Daddy taught him when he was ten. Then he shut the tractor off and climbed down.

He stood in front of me with his hands in his jacket pockets. He looked at the deck, and the shutters, and the porch swing still lying on the boards where Pam left it.

“Daddy told me,” Lonnie said. “In March. He said, Son, your sister earned that house. He said it twice. I told myself he was on the morphine.”

“He wasn’t on morphine in March,” I said.

“I know it.” Lonnie looked down at the gravel. “I needed that six fifty so bad I told myself whatever I had to. That’s the truth of it. I’m sorry, Cheryl. I’m sorry I said you were living rent free. You were nursing our daddy. I wasn’t.”

My brother is fifty years old, and I had never in my life heard him say he was sorry for anything. I set my coffee down on the deck rail.

“You hung that swing for him,” I said. “He slept in it every afternoon.”

“I know he did.”

“Well,” I said. “It’s not going to hang itself.”

So Lonnie got the drill out of his tractor box and hung Daddy’s swing off the end of my new deck, with the same chains, at the same height, and then he got down on his knees in the gravel next to me and we set the skirting together.

It took us all day. We didn’t talk much. Around noon, Earl walked across the road with a plate of ham sandwiches and three bottles of Coke and stayed to hold panels.

Around three, Pam came with a pie. Nobody mentioned the six hundred fifty dollars.

When we were done, Lonnie stood back and looked at the whole house sitting level and skirted on Earl’s high ground, the metal roof catching the low sun.

“She looks good, sis,” he said. “Daddy’d say it’s the best porch in the county.”

“It’s a deck,” I said.

“Not to him it ain’t,” Lonnie said, and he had to turn around and look at the hay field for a while.