The Seat I Gave Miss Ada

The Lane She Knew

Ada started talking about halfway down the lane. Once she started, I slowed my steps so she would have all the time in the world to finish.

“I rode this lane the first time in nineteen and forty-seven,” she said. She said it to no one and to all of us at once.

“It was not a pumpkin patch then. It was a hay lane and nothing else. My daddy’s team was black, and I was six years old.”

A couple of the kids went quiet in the hay behind her.

There is a thing old people can do to children, if the children have never once been told to stop listening. Ada can do it.

“There was a tree right there,” she said. She lifted her cane and pointed into the windbreak.

There is a stump there now. A big gray stump, wider across than a dinner table.

“That was the climbing tree,” she said. “Every child in this township climbed that tree. Your grandmothers climbed that tree.”

Two little girls looked at the stump like it had turned into a church.

“What happened to it?” one of them asked.

“It got old,” Ada said. “Same as me. They do not cut you down when you get old.”

She patted the bench beside her with her dry hand.

“They just let you be a place to sit,” she said.

The kids laughed, and I had to look out at the corn for a second and breathe.

“Did you really climb it?” the smallest boy asked her. He had hay in his hair and both front teeth gone.

“To the very top,” Ada said. “Walt dared me the summer we were courting. I climbed higher than he did and I would not come down until he said I was the best climber in the county.”

“Did he say it?” the boy asked.

“He hollered it to the whole township,” Ada said. “That is how I knew I would marry him. A man who will tell the truth loud when it costs him something, you hold onto that one.”

The mothers in the hay laughed, and one of them wiped her eye with the back of her wrist and pretended it was the wind.

Harlan clicked his tongue at the horses. The patch was coming up ahead now.

The orange of it showed through the last of the corn. Hundreds of pumpkins sitting out on the flattened vines like the field had broken out in lamps.

“Forty years I have ridden out to that,” Ada said, softer now, just to me.

“Walt built the first stand out here with his own two hands. Charged a nickel a pumpkin. Your daddy was a little boy.”

She put her dry hand over mine on the rail.

“You did not have to walk, Gwen,” she said.

“I know,” I said.

“I know you know,” she said. “That is the only reason I let you.”