The Yards My Boy Raked for Nothing

I did not tell her about Rick. I want that understood. I did not go up and down the street telling the town my brother was a thief.

I just said the boy was raking for free this fall. I let people make of it what they would.

And Cole raked. Lord, that boy raked.

Mrs. Dillard has two big silver maples and they drop a yard deep. He worked that whole morning, raking into long windrows and then into piles, and I came behind him holding the bags open.

He did not do it halfhearted because it was free. He did it better.

He raked the beds out and got the leaves from under the yew bushes where they mat down and kill the grass, which a grown man with a machine will not bother to do.

Mrs. Dillard watched from her porch glider with a quilt over her knees. Around eleven she came down the steps with two mugs. Hot cocoa, the kind with the little marshmallows.

She handed one to Cole and one to me and stood there in her housecoat and shawl.

“My Walter used to do these maples,” she said, watching Cole. “Forty years he did them. I haven’t had them done right since he passed.” Her voice did a thing. “That boy rakes like Walter did. Into the beds. Nobody does the beds.”

Cole’s ears went red. He is not a boy who takes a compliment easy. “Yes ma’am,” he said, and went back to raking.

When we finished, her yard looked like a magazine. Cole stood back and looked at it, and I saw something come back into his face that Rick had taken out of it in that barn.

Pride. The real kind. The kind you make yourself and nobody can get up on a shelf and steal.

“One down,” I said.

“How many we doing, Mama?”

I looked up and down our street at all those yards and all those porches. “All of them,” I said. “Every widow on the street. The whole fall.”

He did not groan. He hefted his rake. “Okay,” he said. That was all. Okay.