Nineteen Pickups Up the Gravel Lane

Nobody made a speech. Nobody said they were sorry. Nobody said one word about Leland Pruitt.

They just went to work.

Ken Halverson took the upstairs with three men and a dolly. Loyd took the kitchen. Virgil Schroeder stood in the front yard on his cane and decided which piece went in which truck, and nobody argued with him, because Virgil had been loading hay wagons since Truman.

The couch went first. Loyd and Cal carried it out the front door, Loyd walking backward. At the door Loyd said one word, “Pivot,” and they turned it on its end without touching the frame, and Virgil said, “There you go,” from the yard.

The dresser from our bedroom, which was my grandmother’s and weighed about what a cow weighs, went out with four men and a moving blanket, and they set it in the bed of Ken’s truck like it was a carton of eggs.

Owen carried the kitchen chairs. He took them one at a time, down the porch steps and across the yard to the trailer on the Moeller brothers’ truck, and he set each one down and went back for the next. Nobody told him to. There were six chairs, and he carried all six, and then he carried the table leaves.

Maisie stood in the kitchen with her clipboard and her map and told grown men where things went, and they listened to her. I heard Ken Halverson say, “Yes, ma’am,” to my eleven-year-old daughter, and I had to go stand in the pantry for a minute.

Jo rode on her dad’s shoulders for most of the morning and pointed. She pointed at the lamp. She pointed at her bed frame. She pointed at the box with her stuffed animals in it and said, “Careful, those are alive.”

The man carrying it, a man named Alvin, Ken’s hired hand, who had hauled kids on the church hayrack for years, said, “I’ll buckle them in,” and he did. He set that box on the passenger seat of his truck and pulled the seat belt across it.

About nine the women started coming.

They didn’t come to carry. They came with thermoses and paper sacks. Ione Voss brought two dozen breakfast burritos wrapped in foil in a cooler. Somebody’s wife brought cinnamon rolls on a sheet pan. They stood in the yard handing out coffee and food, and every so often one of them would disappear into the house and come out with a box nobody had gotten to yet.

Then, a little after ten, three of them got in a car and drove off south, and I didn’t think anything of it.

By ten thirty the house was empty to the walls.

Then I heard a saw.

It was coming from the pantry. I went to the door, and Cal was in there on one knee with his small handsaw and a pry bar, working the trim board off the side of the pantry doorframe.

“Cal,” I said. “That’s Leland’s house.”

“I know whose house it is,” he said.

He worked the pry bar in along the edge, gentle, and the old trim board came loose with a little squeal of nails. He’d cut it clean at the top, just under the head casing, and at the bottom above the baseboard, so it came off in one long piece.