The Yards My Boy Raked for Nothing

What Cole Was Saving For

Cole wanted a deer rifle. His own. Not to borrow his daddy’s, not to wait for some birthday when money was soft.

His own rifle, bought with his own money. So that when the youth gun weekend came in November he could walk out into the Hendersons’ woodlot beside his father and be a hunter, not a kid tagging along.

Dale had promised to take him. Dale is my husband, and he is a good one, but good and present are two different things in a year like this one.

The paving work was all down around Columbus. He was gone Monday to Friday, home late Friday night smelling of tar and tired to the bone.

He had told Cole in August, man to man, that if the boy saved up for the gun himself, Dale would handle the license and the shells and the time off. Then the two of them would go.

“How much is a rifle,” Cole had asked me. I looked, and told him the plain truth. A used one that would do him right ran a couple hundred dollars. A new youth model more than that.

His face had not fallen. It had set. That is Dale in him.

He had gone out the next Saturday with our push rake over his shoulder, knocked on Mrs. Dillard’s door, and asked did she want her leaves done for five dollars.

Five dollars a yard. That was his price, and he held to it, and he did the work right. Raking into the beds and bagging it, not just blowing it into the road the way the big boys with the machines did.

Word moved on our street the way word does. By the end of September he had eleven regular yards and a coffee can that was starting to have that good heavy feel.

I want you to understand the kind of saving this was. He did not spend a dime of it.

Kids at school had the candy and the cards and the little games on their phones. Cole had a coffee can and a number in his head.

I would catch him at night with the lid off, counting. Not because he thought it had changed, but because counting it was the reward.