The Lawn Chairs Facing the Road

The Coffee Can

I would have kept it between Vern and me. But Peggy Estes came to see Arlen the next Saturday with a pan of chicken and rice, and Peggy was a nurse for thirty years, and nobody keeps anything from Peggy.

She and her husband, Ron, run the camp store at Siloam Springs State Park, over in Adams County. We have camped there twenty summers. Every Thursday night, a dozen rigs sit around the fire ring at the back loop, retired teachers and truckers and a man who sold insurance. We call them the Siloam bunch. They have eaten our sweet corn and listened to Arlen describe the ocean for twenty years.

Peggy looked at Arlen in his recliner for about four seconds. “Your color’s bad,” she said. “And your wife’s is worse. What happened?”

I held out most of an afternoon. But there was a plate of chicken and rice on the table, and Arlen said, “Tell her, Lo,” and I did.

“How much?” she said finally.

“Peggy, we are fine. We have the money. We are not asking anybody for anything.”

“I didn’t say you were.”

She kissed Arlen on the forehead and left. What I did not know was that she drove to Jacksonville that Monday and sat down across the desk from Vern Tolliver, and that Peggy has a way of asking a question a decent man cannot walk around.

The way a county works, when one person is told something, forty know it by Wednesday. By the next Thursday night, I am told, there was a coffee can on the counter at the camp store with a slit in the plastic lid. Peggy had written one word on the label in black marker. Pacific.

Nobody put a name on it. The campers came in for ice and dropped in a ten, or a twenty, or a roll of quarters, and Ron rang up the ice and said nothing. Pastor Dan Weems heard it from the prayer chain, and a can appeared at the Wednesday soup supper at Pleasant Ridge Methodist, with the same word on the same strip of masking tape.

And here is the part I most want you to understand. In five weeks, as far as I know, nobody in that network of kind people said a word to Doug Mercer.

A whole county was holding its breath in one direction, and it never once breathed on him.

Meanwhile Ron spread his road atlas across the camp store table and started writing in the margins. His cousin had a farm outside Sioux Falls with a gravel lane and a hookup. Pastor Dan’s college roommate ran cattle outside Boise.

By the time the can was full, there were forty-one names penciled in that atlas. Forty-one driveways, one for every night between our barn and the Pacific, with a phone number beside each one.

Five Weeks

I said I gave Doug a chance, and I want to be fair about how.

I did not corner him. On the second Sunday in October, when I was drying dishes and he came into the kitchen for the gravy boat, I said, “Doug, if there’s anything you want to tell Arlen before his birthday, I will never bring it up again.”

He stood there with the gravy boat in both hands, and something crossed his face, quick, like a cloud shadow on a bean field.

“I don’t know what you mean,” he said.

“I think you do.”

“The fund’s fine, Loretta. Everything is handled.” He gave me a pleasant smile and carried the gravy boat out.

It was Arlen who said it, in the dark, one night in late October. “That boy is drowning, Lo. I don’t know in what. But he’s the only one in this family who doesn’t know how to say so.”