The Saturdays We Raked Her Leaves

We didn’t want her money. We never had. Clay makes a good living with the county, and I make a fair one with the agency, and the kids have shoes. We wanted her. We wanted Clay’s mother back.

And for the record, since somebody always asks: leaving a son one dollar does not keep him from contesting a will in Tennessee or anywhere else I know of.

That’s an old wives’ tale. Vonda believed it. I was not about to argue law with her over a turkey.

That night after the kids were in bed, I sat at the kitchen table and prayed. I didn’t pray for the will to change.

I prayed that I would not get bitter, because I could feel it trying to take root in me.

Saturday morning we pulled into Vonda’s driveway at eight o’clock sharp. Clay had the truck loaded with four rakes, a box of fifty leaf bags, two pairs of kids’ work gloves, and a thermos of coffee.

The house was dark except for the kitchen light. Her car was in the carport. The front curtain was closed tight, the way she always kept it until she’d had her second cup.

“Are we going to knock?” Gracie asked, standing by the tailgate with her gloves on the wrong hands.

“No,” Clay said. “We’re not going to knock. We’re not going to ask. We’re just going to rake.”

So we did. Clay took the front yard by the road, where the leaves were deepest. I took the side yard by the driveway.

Gracie and Rhett worked the flower beds, which mostly meant Rhett jumped in the piles and Gracie fussed at him.

About twenty minutes in, I looked up at the front window. The curtain moved. Just a couple of inches, then it dropped back into place like nothing had happened.

“She’s watching,” I told Clay quietly, so the kids wouldn’t hear.

“I know,” he said, and he kept raking without looking up.

Those oaks are old. Ray’s granddaddy planted them, or that is how the family tells it.

There are five of them in that yard, and in a good year they drop more leaves than seems possible for any five trees to hold.

We raked till noon. My shoulders ached in a way they hadn’t ached since I was a teenager, when I worked summers stacking square bales for a farmer outside Greeneville. Clay worked steady and didn’t stop except to drink coffee.

By the end we had thirty-one bags lined up at the curb, tied and standing in a row like soldiers.

The yard underneath was flat and patchy where last year’s leaves had smothered it all winter.

Across the road, the Whitakers’ front door had opened sometime during the morning. Mr. Whitaker came out onto his porch in his house shoes with a cup of coffee, and he stood there and watched us most of the morning.

When we were loading the truck, he lifted his cup to Clay. Clay lifted his hand back. Nobody said anything.

In that part of Tennessee, between two men who both know what a day’s work looks like, nobody has to.

The next Saturday we came back. So did the leaves. That is the thing nobody tells you about big oaks.

They do not drop all at once like a maple does. They let go a little at a time.

They let go all the way through November and well into December. You can rake a yard bare on Saturday and have it covered again by Wednesday.