The Pennies That Fed A Grade

Scrubbing

We made a line. Maddie’s job was to scoop pennies into a bucket with a plastic cup, which she thought was the best job anybody had ever been given. Dylan carried the buckets to the wash tub. I had the tub full of hot soapy water, and I would dump a bucket in and work them with my hands and a rag, and the water would go brown in about four seconds.

Then I would scoop the clean ones into a second tub to rinse, and Dylan would spread them on old towels on the porch to dry in the sun.

It is slow. I want to be honest about how slow. We did it all that first day and when the light went I do not think we had done a tenth of them. My back felt like someone had stood on it. My hands were pruned and the skin at my knuckles was cracking.

But something happened out there that I did not plan, and it was the thing that saved the whole week.

Along about noon that first day, old Mr. Pruitt drove by slow, the way everybody drives by slow in our town, and he stopped. He rolled his window down.

“Tara,” he said. “What in the world.”

I told him. I kept it short and I kept the spite out of it, because Jeff’s mother used to say that a story tells itself worse the madder you sound. I just said Mr. Hale paid my last check in pennies and dumped them, and the kids and I were cleaning them up.

Mr. Pruitt did not say anything for a second. Then he said, “Hale did that.”

It was not a question. It was a man setting a fact down in a place where he would remember it.

“He did,” I said.

Mr. Pruitt drove off. And I did not think about it again, but I should have, because that is how a thing travels in a town like ours. Not in one big announcement. One slow pickup at a time.