The Saturdays We Raked Her Leaves

Ray knew that. That is why he raked every Saturday. It was never a one-time job. It was a season.

About an hour in, we ran out of bags. Clay had underestimated the second drop.

Rhett said he would go check the shed, because Pawpaw always kept extra bags in the shed, and before I could stop him he was gone.

He was in there a long time. Long enough that I set my rake down to go see about him.

Then he came out the shed door slow, dragging something behind him across the grass.

It was an old wooden rake with a long handle and metal tines, the kind nobody sells anymore.

The handle had cracked at some point, and somebody had wrapped it tight with black electrical tape, around and around, neat as a bandage.

Rhett walked it all the way across the yard to his daddy. “Daddy,” he said, “is this Pawpaw’s? It’s got letters on it.”

He pointed to where somebody had burned R.H. into the wood near the top. “Can I use it?”

Clay looked at that rake for a long time. Then he turned around and faced the road with his back to all of us, and he just stood there with his hands on his hips.

I knew what he was doing. I didn’t go to him. Some things a man has to do with his back turned, and a good wife knows to let him.

When he turned around, his eyes were red and his voice was rough. “Yes, buddy,” he said. “That’s Pawpaw’s. He taped that handle up when I was about your age. He’d want you to use it.”

Rhett raked with his grandpa’s rake the rest of the morning. It was longer than he was tall.

He had to hold it halfway down the handle and drag it like an oar. He did not complain one time.

When I looked up at the window that morning, the curtain was open. Not moved. Open, a good foot wide.

I could see the shape of Vonda standing back from the glass in the dim of the front room.

She was watching her grandson rake her yard with her husband’s rake.

She stood there a long time, longer than she ever had. But she did not come out, and the door stayed shut.

Gracie found a box of bags on a high shelf in the shed, and we raked till noon again.

Twenty-six bags that week. We lined them at the curb next to where the town truck picks up on Mondays.

That week, I heard later, was the week the street started talking. It is a short street, eight houses.

Everybody knows everybody’s car and everybody’s business, and most of them know your mama’s maiden name.

Thirty-one bags of leaves at the curb one week and twenty-six the next does not go unnoticed.

Not with Clay’s truck sitting in his mama’s driveway every Saturday morning where the whole street can see it.

The woman next door, Mrs. Garrett, has lived beside Vonda for twenty years. On Tuesday she caught Vonda out at the mailbox getting her electric bill and a Christmas card from her cousin.

“Was that Clay and his family out on your yard Saturday?” Mrs. Garrett asked her. “Both Saturdays? Lord, Vonda, you raised a good boy. Those babies were out there working like grown men.”