Nineteen Pickups Up the Gravel Lane

He went on Tuesday, on his lunch break, in the daylight, in his work clothes. He drove out to Leland’s place on the blacktop and they stood in the yard, two men who had sat in the same church for thirty years, and Cal asked for sixty days so the kids could finish the semester in one house.

He called me from the elevator lot as soon as he got back, with the dryers roaring behind him after all.

“He said the hunters want it by the first of November,” Cal said. “He said he’s sorry. I believe he’s sorry. He said it about four times.”

“Sorry doesn’t pack boxes.”

“No,” Cal said. “It doesn’t.”

That week I looked at every rental in three counties. There was a single-wide outside of Leon with a cracked window, and a duplex in town for eleven hundred with two bedrooms for five people. There was nothing else, not with harvest on.

I drive a school bus, Route Four, and keep books for two farm families and the feed store in between. Eleven hundred a month was going to pinch, and two bedrooms was going to pinch worse.

On Thursday Cal’s grandma Edie called.

Edie Kroeger was eighty-four that fall. She’d lived on her farm four miles south of us for sixty-one years, the last nineteen of them a widow, until she fell on the cellar stairs in March and broke her hip. After the rehab she moved into the senior apartments in town, near the clinic, and the farmhouse had sat empty since.

She wouldn’t sell it. Her kids had asked, and her grandkids had asked, and she said she would sell it when she was dead and not a day before, and since she said it with a smile nobody pushed.

“I heard,” she said on the phone, without hello. Edie never wasted a hello. “Somebody at the beauty shop heard from somebody at the care center. Is it true about Leland?”

“It’s true.”

“Thirty days.”

“Thirty days.”

She made a little sound, the sound older women make when there’s a thing they won’t say out loud. Then she said, “That house of mine is sitting there with nobody in it, and I am paying the electric to keep the pipes from freezing. You and Cal and those children should be in it.”

“Edie, we couldn’t.”

“You could and you will. I’m not giving it to you, I’m renting it to you. Whatever you were paying Leland, you pay me, and the first time Cal fixes something on that place I’ll knock off a month.”

I sat down at the kitchen table. I hadn’t cried yet. I’d been holding it for four days, and it was Edie being bossy that finally let it out.

“That house needs a family in it,” she said, more gently. “It’s been too quiet out there since March. You’ll do it a favor.”

So that was where we were going. Four miles south, to a farmhouse with a bad roof on the back porch, a good furnace, and a kitchen that smelled like sixty years of bread.

The trouble was getting there.

Cal was working twelve-hour days. Harvest doesn’t wait for anybody’s landlord. His boss, a quiet man named Loyd who’d run that elevator for twenty years, told him he could have the last Saturday of October off, and that was a real gift in the middle of harvest, but it was one day.

One day, one man, a teenage boy, a woman who drives a bus, and two girls, to move eleven years of a family out of a two-story house.