Nineteen Pickups Up the Gravel Lane

Leland Pruitt stood on our porch with his cap in one hand and an envelope in the other, and he held the envelope out to me before he even said hello.

It was a Sunday in late September, maybe two hours after church let out. The beans across the road were turning, and the wind was pushing dust down the gravel lane.

I had my hands full of a dish towel and a pan I’d been drying. I set the pan on the porch rail, wiped my hands, and took the envelope because he was holding it out and I was raised to take what people hand you.

“I wanted to bring it myself,” Leland said. “I didn’t think it was right to mail it.”

I opened it standing there. It was one sheet, typed, with his signature at the bottom in the same blue pen he used on the offering envelopes. Thirty days’ notice to vacate the property. Possession on or before October thirty-first.

I read it twice. Then I looked up at him, and he looked at the porch boards.

“Leland,” I said. “What is this.”

“I’ve got a group out of Chicago,” he said. “Four men. They hunt pheasant and deer, and they want a house to come back to at night. They’ll pay eighteen hundred a month for the season, November through January. Cash, three months up front.”

Behind me the screen door creaked, and I knew without turning around that it was Jo, our youngest. She was six and she could hear a grown-up voice change from two rooms away.

“Go on back in, honey,” I said. “Help Maisie with the dishes.”

She went. Leland watched her go, and something went across his face, and then it was gone again and he was looking at the boards.

“Eleven years,” I said. “We’ve been here eleven years.”

“I know it.”

“Seven hundred fifty a month. Never late. Not once.”

“I know that too, Tess. You’ve been the best renters I ever had. I’m not saying anything against you.”

“Then what are you saying?”

He put his cap back on. He was sixty-eight that year, a big man gone a little soft since he sold the implement dealership, and he had the kind of hands that had turned wrenches for forty years before he ever sat behind a desk.

“I’m saying June’s at the care center in town,” he said. “You know that. What you maybe don’t know is it runs nine thousand dollars a month. Private pay. We used up what we had set aside in the first year. I’ve been selling ground. I don’t have a lot of ground left to sell.”

I didn’t say anything. I knew June. Everybody knew June. She’d taught half the county to play piano and the other half to sit still in Sunday school.

“The hunters pay cash,” Leland said again, like it was the whole explanation, and maybe to him it was.

“Thirty days,” I said. “Leland, we have three kids in school.”

“It’s what the law says for month to month. I looked it up.”

“I’m not asking what the law says.”

He went down the steps then. At the bottom he turned around like he was going to say something more, and he didn’t. He got in his truck and drove back down the lane, and the dust hung in the air behind him a long time after he was gone.

I stood on the porch with the letter in my hand and the pan still sitting on the rail.