The Lawn Chairs Facing the Road

What Was in the Can

There was twenty-four thousand, three hundred and fifty dollars in it. Tens and twenties and a great many fives, a roll of quarters with a rubber band around it, and two crumpled dollar bills with a child’s pencil drawing of a fish on one.

There was an envelope from the Siloam bunch with a card in Peggy’s neat nurse’s hand. From everybody who ever ate your sweet corn.

I learned later that a hundred and eighty-three people had given. Most of them had not signed.

“Peggy, I can’t take this,” I said, and my voice was not steady. “I have never in my life taken a dollar I couldn’t pay back.”

“Then pay it back,” said Peggy.

“How?”

It was Arlen who answered. He was standing with one hand on the can, his eyes wet and his chin up, the way it was on our wedding day.

“Postcards,” he said. “One for every name in that can, from every state line between here and the water.” He looked around the room. “That’s the deal, folks. You paid for it. We’ll show you where it went.”

A sound went through that kitchen, half laugh and half something else. Ava, my twelve-year-old granddaughter, got up, walked around the table, and held her grandfather’s hand.

Then Arlen looked at his daughter’s husband, standing at the head of the table with a carving knife in front of him and his color gone. I will tell you what he did, because I do not know a better thing a man has ever done.

“Doug,” said Arlen.

“Arlen, I…”

“I can’t crank that landing gear. The doctor says no lifting for two months.” My husband picked up the cane the doctor had insisted on. He carried it like a man carrying a hat. “It sticks on the left side, and it has to be set level or the door won’t seal. I need somebody with good hands.”

The room was so quiet I could hear the refrigerator.

“Come on out and give me a hand, son,” said Arlen. “I need you.”

He set down the knife. He walked around the table, past Merle, past my sister, past his own wife with her hand still over her mouth, and out the back door into the cold. Arlen followed him with the cane.

Through the kitchen window, with twenty-three people standing behind me, I watched my son-in-law get down on one knee on our gravel and take hold of the landing jack handle with both hands.

Merle came out last. He crossed the yard with his coat open and, without a word, knelt on the other side and held the hitch plate level with his own two hands while Doug cranked.

The jack sticks on the left side. It always has. Doug leaned into it with his shoulders, and the whole thirty-two feet came up an inch at a time.

Nobody said anything to him the whole time he cranked. When it was level, Doug stayed on his knees with his hand on the handle. Arlen stood over him with his cane, and at last my husband put one hand on the back of his neck, the way you would a boy caught at something, and left it there.

That was all the punishment he ever got from us.