The Lawn Chairs Facing the Road

The Second Sunday in November

The morning of Arlen’s seventy-second birthday was clear and cold, with frost on the pad and the light coming in low through the kitchen window.

By noon, the table was set with the leaf in and two card tables beside it. Twenty-three Hanes people came through the back door. Merle and Sharon and their boys, my sister from Griggsville, Arlen’s cousins, and every child young enough to run through a kitchen.

Doug and Janelle came last, with Mason and Ava. Doug wore a good shirt, ironed, and shook hands all around the room.

Arlen sat at the side of the table in a clean white shirt and a vest I had bought him in 1999.

Doug stood at the head of the table with the carving knife.

Merle, who farms nine hundred acres and has been the family’s measure of a man for sixty years, looked at him and said, “Well, Doug. You’ve taken over the head of the table.”

“Somebody has to, with Arlen’s heart,” Doug said. He was reaching for approval, I thought, the way he had reached for it across that table for eighteen years, and I felt something tender and tired toward him. “I’m making sure everything’s handled.”

He set the knife in the roast. That was when we all heard the horn.

It was a long, low air horn, the kind a diesel truck carries on its cab, and it came from the end of the lane. It sounded once, and then again, and every head in the room turned to the window.

I had told no one but Vern. I would learn later that Vern had told exactly one other person, and that she had asked him the right way. Yet there I stood at the window with the whole lane moving.

The first truck was a white Ford with the name Tolliver on the door. Behind it, on a gooseneck hitch, came a cream fifth wheel with a brown stripe, rocking gently on the ruts at ten miles an hour.

Behind it came a second truck, and a third. A motor home, a pickup towing a travel trailer, Ron Estes’ old green Dodge with Peggy waving from the window, Pastor Dan’s Buick. I counted seventeen vehicles before I stopped counting.

Doug had not moved. He stood at the head of the table with the knife still in the roast and his eyes on the lane, and I watched the color go out of his face a little at a time, like water out of a basin.

Vern backed the camper onto the gravel pad inch by inch, with Ron waving him in with both arms. When the engine stopped, the whole lane was still.

Then Vern got out. He is a very large man, and he wore a tan jacket and a tie as if for a funeral. He walked up our porch steps with a folded paper in one hand, took off his cap in the doorway, and looked past all of us at the man holding the carving knife.

“Mr. Mercer,” said Vern. He did not raise his voice. “I believe you and I should say hello.”