The Yards My Boy Raked for Nothing

The Empty Coffee Can

Cole came in from the barn with the coffee can held out in both hands. I knew before he said a word. A full can has a weight to it. This one did not.

“It’s light, Mama,” he said. He shook it. A single quarter rattled around the bottom like a stone in an empty boot.

He was ten. He had been hiding that Folgers can up on the rafter shelf in our barn since the first week of September, behind the paint cans where he figured nobody looked.

He had counted it out loud to me twice a week on the kitchen table. A crumpled stack of ones and fives, mostly ones.

“Maybe you moved it,” I said, even though I knew he had not. He was a careful boy about his money. More careful than his mother had ever been about hers.

“I didn’t move it.” His voice did the thing where it climbs and then catches. “There was a hundred and sixteen dollars. I counted Tuesday. It was a hundred and sixteen.”

I set down the dish towel. I went out to the barn with him in my sock feet, across the cold gravel, because part of me needed to see the empty shelf for myself.

The lid was off. It was sitting beside the can, upside down. The way a man leaves a thing when he is in a hurry and does not plan to put it back.

I stood there in the smell of old motor oil and hay, and I did the arithmetic that a mother does. Who had been in our barn. Who knew Cole kept something back there.

Who had come by Thursday night when Dale was three hours away on the paving crew, and had sat at my table drinking my coffee, looking like a man with a hole in him.

My brother Rick. It was Rick. I knew it the way you know your own handwriting.

“Somebody took it,” Cole said. He was not crying yet. He was working it out, same as me, and the working out is worse than the crying. “Who would take it, Mama. It was in the barn.”

I put my hand on the back of his neck. His hair needed cutting. “We’ll figure it,” I said. “You go on in and start your homework. Let me think a minute.”

He went. I heard the screen door slap.

I stood out there in the dark barn and let myself be angry for exactly as long as it took the cold to come up through my socks. Then I made myself stop. Anger was not going to put a rifle in that boy’s hands.

A hundred and sixteen dollars. To most people that is a tank of gas and a trip to the store. To Cole it was September and October.

It was every Saturday he had skipped the cartoons to go drag a rake around some stranger’s yard. It was his whole self, poured into a coffee can on a rafter.

He wanted one thing in this world and he was willing to work for it.

I came back inside and washed the gravel off my feet at the kitchen sink. I did not call anybody. Not that night.