The Yards My Boy Raked for Nothing

The Whole Street

By the last week of October we had raked eleven yards, some of them twice. The thing had taken on a life I did not plan.

Other people started showing up. Not to pay. To help, or just to be near it.

The Mennonite family that farms out east of town sent two of their boys over one Saturday with their own rakes. The four kids cleared three yards before noon and nobody said a word about money.

The man who runs the hardware, Jeff, drove by and saw Cole working. He came back twenty minutes later with a box of good contractor bags and left them on our porch with no note.

He knew. By then everybody knew somebody had done us wrong, even if they did not know the name.

I need to tell you about the cocoa, because it got to be a thing. It started with Mrs. Dillard, the two mugs.

Once one widow did it they all did it, the way women of that generation will.

Every yard we finished, out would come a woman onto the porch with something hot in her hands and usually something baked besides. Cole must have eaten his weight in gingersnaps that month.

He raked a yard and got cocoa and a cookie and a story about the woman’s late husband. Every one of them had a husband who used to do these leaves.

Every one of them had been watching their yards go to ruin for want of a man. Here was a ten-year-old boy doing it right and asking nothing.

Joyce Arnett cried on her porch. I will not forget it.

She watched Cole rake out the beds under her picture window where her Bill used to plant his marigolds. She stood there with a dish of warm apple crisp and the tears just ran down into her collar.

“I am sorry, honey, I don’t know what’s the matter with me,” she said.

Cole, who is ten and does not know what to do with a crying woman, said, “You want me to do the back too, ma’am.” She laughed through it and said yes. Do the back too.

Dale came home that Friday and found out the whole arc of it. The can, Rick, the raking. He sat at the table quiet for a long time with his big cracked hands around a cup. He is not a talker.

“You didn’t call anybody,” he said finally.

“No,” I said. “He’s my brother.”

Dale nodded. He has a brother too. “What about the boy’s rifle,” he said. “Youth weekend’s three weeks out. The money’s gone.”

“I don’t know yet,” I said. “But I’ll tell you what. He’s got more than a rifle now. You should see this street look at him.”

Dale went out the next morning, Saturday, and raked right alongside Cole all day. The two of them not talking much, working down the row of yards, and I stood bagging behind them.

I thought that whatever Rick had taken, he had somehow handed us this instead. Though he never meant to give us a thing.