Nineteen Pickups Up the Gravel Lane

“Lord,” he said. “Thank you for this family. Thank you for this house. Thank you for strong backs and good trucks. Bless this food. Amen.”

And then we ate chili standing up, all of us, in a house that had been empty since March.

Jo sat on the floor by the furnace register with a bowl of chili in her lap. After a while she got up and went and found Edie and climbed up on her lap, quilt and all, and Edie let her.

“Is this house going to be ours now?” Jo asked her.

“For as long as you need it,” Edie said.

“Does it have cats?”

“It’s had about forty,” Edie said. “They’re under the apple tree.”

Jo thought about that. “Then I’ll tell them we’re here,” she said.

Owen carried the doorframe board in from the truck after everyone was gone. He didn’t ask anybody where it should go. He went into Edie’s kitchen and stood looking at the pantry door for a long time, and then he went and found his dad.

A week later, on a Saturday afternoon, Cal and Owen hung it on the wall beside Edie’s pantry door with two brass screws. Not nailed into the frame. Hung next to it, where you could see the whole thing, top to bottom.

Then Cal got out a pencil, and he backed Owen up against Edie’s pantry doorframe, the real one, with a book flat on his head, and he made a mark.

Owen, 14. Kroeger place.

And then Maisie, and then Jo, who stood on her tiptoes until Cal made her stand flat.

We’ve been in Edie’s house a year now. We pay her what we paid Leland, and she knocks a month off every time Cal fixes something. Cal fixed the back porch roof first. Edie came out on a Sunday to inspect it and called it adequate, which from her is high praise.

Leland’s hunters came the first of November and stayed through deer season. In March I heard at the feed store that he’d sold the place, house and eighty acres both. The hunters paid for three months a year, and June’s care center charged for twelve.

June passed in May. The girls had gone and sung for her at Christmas, the way I’d promised. They sang “Silent Night” and “Away in a Manger,” and June couldn’t sing anymore, but she moved her hand on the blanket in time, and Leland sat in the corner of the room and couldn’t look at any of us.

At the funeral, all nineteen of those men were there. They sat in their pews in their good coats, and afterward they shook Leland’s hand on the church steps, one at a time, and every one of them said something to him that day.

He sits two pews ahead of us still. Some Sundays he nods. Most Sundays he doesn’t. I don’t hold it against him either way, and I try not to hold the other thing against him either, though some days that is a harder prayer than others.

But when I close my eyes, the picture I see is not the trucks, and not the chili, and not even my boy with that board against his chest.

It’s the last thing I saw in my side mirror that noon, as our truck turned off the gravel onto the blacktop with the long line of pickups behind us. Leland Pruitt had walked up the steps after we pulled out, and there he was, standing alone on the empty porch with the key.