The Receipts I Pinned to My Porch Rail

Chapter 6

Neil Tauber got out and stood on my sidewalk with his hands on his hips, and I watched him take in what he was looking at.

Three hundred people, maybe. A porch strung with paper like a clothesline. Men and women reading, one slip at a time, with tea.

“What is this?” he said.

“It’s what you said was worth nothing,” I said. “I thought folks might like to see.”

He looked at the crowd. The crowd looked at him. Nobody said a word.

“This is a public nuisance,” he said. “You’re attaching things to my building.”

“It’s twine, Mr. Tauber.”

“It’s my building.”

Ward Hendershot had gotten to his feet at the rail. He said, mildly, “Son, I sold the lumber for this porch. That’s my handwriting on the ticket.”

“With respect, sir, that has nothing to do with it.”

And then from the sidewalk, a boy of fifteen or sixteen in a marching-band jacket said, very clearly, “That’s Miss Odessa’s porch.”

Mr. Tauber turned red from the collar up.

“You have until the thirtieth,” he said to me, and he got back in his truck. He did not look at the porch again. I will give him that. I think he could not.

That should have been the whole of it. But I was wrong about what a good Saturday does, in a town like ours.

On Wednesday morning, Marlene Cobb, who edits the Corliss Courier out of two rooms over the barber shop, ran a picture across the top of the front page. It was my porch, and my rail, and the twine, with Ward Hendershot in his cap reading a slip.

The headline was only five words long, and it did not name Mr. Tauber at all. It said What the Porch Cost Her.

Underneath, Marlene had printed one line. If you ever waited on Odessa Kimbrell’s porch, write to us.

The letters began on Thursday. By the following Tuesday, there were sixty-one of them, in envelopes and on notebook paper and on the back of a church bulletin. They came from Atlanta and Fort Wayne and the Navy base in Norfolk. One came from a woman in the county jail, who wrote that she had been the girl who never had a coat.

I read them at my kitchen table, and I did not get through the stack in one sitting.

Other things were happening that week that I did not arrange.

Lenora Beck, the clerk at the village office, pulled an old file out of the basement on Friday. It was a building permit, number 05-0117, for a “front and side porch, roofed, wood frame.” It listed the owner as Alvin Dwyer. It listed the builder as Odessa Kimbrell, with owner’s written consent. Alvin’s consent was stapled behind it, in a shaky hand, on the back of a feed-store calendar.

She made me a copy, and she certified it. “It’s only a piece of paper,” she said, “but it has a stamp.”