The Lawn Chairs Facing the Road

The Two Lawn Chairs

The two lawn chairs were still on the gravel pad beside the barn, set side by side and facing the road, and the camper they had been facing was gone.

I stood in the driveway with a paper sack of Arlen’s clean pajamas in one hand and my purse in the other, and I looked at that pad for a long time.

You do not understand how big a fifth wheel is until you see the space it leaves behind. There was a pale rectangle in the grass, thirty-two feet long, where the sun had not touched since April. There were four square dents in the gravel where the landing jacks had stood.

Our chairs sat at the near end of that rectangle, the green webbed ones from the farm store. Arlen and I had carried our coffee out to them every evening for five months and looked at that camper the way other people look at a lake.

I had driven home from the hospital in Quincy for the first time in four days. Arlen was on his ninth day in a bed on the cardiac floor. It had started with a heart attack in the hay mow at the Dobbs place, and by then it was mostly a matter of waiting for his lungs to clear.

Then I saw the tire tracks. They were wide dual tracks, turning in a long careful arc, and they came and went from the lane on a clean line. Nobody steals a camper that tidily. Somebody had been given the keys and a reason.

I took out my phone, and it took me three tries to find the right number, because my hands were doing something I did not like.

What the Camper Was

I should tell you what that camper was, or the rest of this will sound like a woman fussing over a vehicle.

My name is Loretta Hanes. I am sixty-eight. Arlen and I farmed four hundred acres outside Pittsfield, Illinois, for forty-three years, corn and beans and hogs, and we raised one daughter, Janelle, in the white house at the end of the lane.

When we married in 1982, we meant to take a honeymoon. But it was March and Arlen’s father had a sow farrowing, and then it was planting, and then it was haying, and then it was forty years. We got two nights in an Ozarks cabin in 1988, and Arlen sat on the porch swing with his boots on the whole time, listening for the phone.

That first summer, he set a Maxwell House can on top of the refrigerator and cut a slot in the plastic lid. “That’s the road fund,” he said. “When it’s full, we go.”

Every Friday for forty years, one of us dropped something into one of those cans. It was a five from egg money, or the change from the feed store, or a twenty from the sweet corn I sold off the tailgate in August.

Every January we carried the can to Farmers State Bank and emptied it into a savings account. The girl at the window quit asking what the purpose was. It was written on the form in her own handwriting. Pacific.

Arlen has never seen an ocean. He grew up on a ridge in Pike County and had never been farther west than a cattle sale in Sioux Falls. “I want to see it from the other side,” he used to say. “Where the sun goes down into it. I want to see where the country runs out.”

So we planned, in pen, on a Square Deal Cafe placemat I kept in my Bible. Badlands, Yellowstone, a night in Boise, and then the Oregon coast, straight down to the water.

In April we drove to Tolliver Camper Sales in Jacksonville and bought a fifth wheel, cream with a brown stripe, five months old, with a bunk room for the grandkids. Forty-one thousand five hundred dollars and change, at the desk of a big, careful man named Vern Tolliver.

Arlen had built an oak step with two treads, because the factory step was too tall for my bad knee. He carried it onto Vern’s lot in his arms and set it in front of the door to see if it fit.

“That’ll do,” he said, and Vern looked at that step and then at Arlen like he had never seen a man test-fit his own stairs before signing.

We were going to leave on the twentieth of September, the Saturday after the Dobbs boys finished their beans.

Arlen’s heart attack came eleven days before that Saturday.