Vonda had to say yes. She had to stand there at the mailbox, with the will she had read out loud not two weeks before sitting in a lawyer’s file downtown, and say yes, that was her son’s family raking her yard.
I know this because Mrs. Garrett told me herself the next Saturday, over the fence. “She just said, ‘Yes, that was Clay,’ and went back in the house,” Mrs. Garrett said. “That’s not like Vonda. Vonda always has another word.”
But I thought about that a lot. Vonda had read that will at her own table so everybody would know where she stood.
Now everybody on her street knew where her son stood, too. Every Saturday. In her front yard. And she had to watch it.
That is a kind of reckoning. It is not loud. It does not need a lawyer or a judge.
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It just stands out there in the yard every week with a rake in its hand, and it waits.
The third Saturday was the twelfth of December. The kids were in a good mood because school let out the next Friday for Christmas break, and Gracie had been practicing for the church Christmas program all week.
She hummed “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” while she raked, even though it was a Thanksgiving hymn and we were three weeks late for it.
She hummed it over and over, the way children do with the one song stuck in their head.
“That’s the wrong song,” Rhett told her, leaning on his grandpa’s rake like an old man at a fence.
“It’s the right song,” Gracie said. “It’s about the harvest getting brought in. That’s what we’re doing. We’re bringing in the harvest.”
“It’s leaves,” Rhett said, with all the scorn a seven-year-old boy can put into two words.
“Leaves count,” said Gracie, and went back to humming.
Clay laughed out loud at that, the first real laugh I had heard out of him since Thanksgiving. Rhett dragged Pawpaw’s rake behind him like it was taller than he was. It was.
About ten o’clock, the front door opened. All four of us stopped. We had been coming for three weeks and that door had not opened one time.
Clay straightened up slow and leaned on his rake. Rhett stood right where he was.
Vonda came out onto the porch. She had on her heavy coat over a housedress, and her house shoes.
She was carrying a tray, and on the tray were two mugs with steam coming off both of them.
She came down the porch steps one at a time, holding the rail with one hand and balancing the tray with the other.
I could see the hip bothering her on every single step down.
I had to make myself stay where I was and not run over and take the tray from her.
I knew it mattered that she carried it herself. Some things a person has to carry all the way, or it doesn’t count.
She walked straight across the yard to the kids. Not to Clay. Not to me. To Gracie and Rhett, standing there in their work gloves with leaves stuck to their jeans.
“It’s hot cider,” she said. “From the orchard up past Sneedville. Your Pawpaw always liked it this time of year. You be careful now, it’s hot.”
Gracie took hers and said, “Thank you, Grandma,” the way I taught her. Rhett took his with both hands, his gloves still on, and looked straight up at her.