The Saturdays We Raked Her Leaves

The turkey was still sitting in the middle of the table, not carved yet, when my mother-in-law pushed her chair back and stood up with a set of folded white papers in her hand.

Vonda Hollister is sixty-nine years old. She spent thirty-one years as the secretary at the elementary school in town, and she still stands the way she did in that front office, straight up, chin level, waiting for quiet.

She got it. Clay set his fork down. Our daughter Gracie, who is ten, stopped pushing her green beans around.

Our son Rhett, who is seven, kept chewing a roll, because seven-year-olds keep chewing no matter what.

“I went and saw a lawyer last week,” Vonda said. “I want everybody to hear this from me and not from somebody at the bank. I’ve made a new will, and I’m going to read it.”

I looked at Clay. He had on the blue button-down I had ironed that morning, and he was looking down at his plate like there was something written on it he had not finished reading yet.

She unfolded the papers. Her hands did not shake. That is what I remember most about the whole afternoon.

Her voice was steady and her hands were steady, and the late sun was coming through the dining room window across the white tablecloth like any other Thanksgiving.

She read the first part slow, the way she used to read the morning announcements.

The house, the money in savings, and the forty acres Ray’s people had left were to go to her sister’s two boys over in Morristown.

Then she lifted her eyes over the top of the page and looked right at my husband. “To my son, Clay Raymond Hollister, I leave the sum of one dollar. So that he cannot contest it.”

Nobody said anything. The clock in the hall ticked. Out the window, a pickup went by slow on the road, and somebody’s dog barked twice and quit.

Clay kept looking at his plate. I reached over and put my hand on his arm.

I could feel how still he was holding himself, the way he holds still when he is backing the county grader down a narrow bank.

Vonda folded the papers in half and then in half again. “You chose, Clay,” she said. “You married her and you moved to town. Your daddy worked that place by himself for fifteen years. And now he’s gone.”

She did not look at me when she said “her.” She did not have to. I had been “her” for fifteen years.

I had been “her” at every Christmas and every Easter and every birthday supper in that brick house.

I need to tell you about Ray, because none of this makes sense without him.

Ray Hollister ran about sixty head of cows and put up hay on his daddy’s forty acres and another hundred he rented from a widow down the road.

He got up at five every morning of his life, Sundays included, and fed before church.

Clay grew up on that place. He could back a hay wagon before he could ride a bicycle.

Everybody, Vonda most of all, figured he would take it over one day, the way Ray took it from his own daddy.

Then Clay met me. I was twenty-two and finishing nursing school in Knoxville.

He was twenty-four and hauling hay for his daddy and working nights at the co-op. We got married the next spring at my home church.