The Yards My Boy Raked for Nothing

Word Got Around

You cannot keep a thing quiet on a street like ours. By the second Saturday, every woman on that block knew the Satterfield boy was raking yards for free.

And the askings started. Not asking for free work. The opposite.

They wanted to pay him and he kept saying no ma’am. A confused, prickly kind of talk started up over the backyard fences and at the Legion hall and in the pew after church.

Why would Connie Satterfield have her boy rake every yard on Hollis Street for nothing. What was that about.

Some guessed it was charity we were doing out of the goodness of our hearts. Some of them, the sharper ones, knew there is always a reason a thing like that starts, and they watched to find it out.

I let them watch. That was the whole point, though I would not have said so out loud.

I wanted the street to see my boy work. I wanted them to see what he was made of.

The one thing I could not do was get his money back. The next best thing was to turn the whole loss into something nobody could ever take.

Mrs. Pruett, down on the corner, was the one who finally pinned me. Alma Pruett. A little bird of a woman, eighty-one, sharp as a tack, buried her husband Harold two years back.

She caught me at the mailboxes.

“All right, Connie,” she said. “I’ve known you since you were in diapers. A boy doesn’t rake a whole street for nothing. What happened to his money.”

I am not a good liar and I did not try. “Somebody took it,” I said. “Out of our barn. His whole fall’s savings. I’d rather not say who, and I’d be obliged if you didn’t ask me to.”

She looked at me a long moment with those bright little eyes. “Family,” she said. Not a question. Old women know. “You could go to the sheriff.”

“I could,” I said. “I’m not going to. I’d rather this street watched my son be a good man than watched his mother be a hard one.”

Alma Pruett nodded slow, like I had passed some test I did not know I was taking.

“Send him by Thursday,” she said. “I’ve got more leaves than God. And Connie. There’s more than one way to get a thing back.”

I did not know what she meant. I thought she was just being kind in the roundabout way old women are.

I told Cole he had the Pruett yard Thursday after school. I did not think another thing about it.

That was my mistake, and the best mistake I ever made.