The Saturday Thirty Men Brought Ladders

At five minutes to four the men started to arrive, not all at once. They came up the walk in twos and threes, in their work clothes, as if they happened to be passing. Wendell. The pastor. Two of the high school boys.

They found places to sit, on the steps and the rail and in lawn chairs from beside her garage. Dwight leaned against the porch post with his arms folded. Lowell Tillman took the top step with a paper sack of Fern’s apples in his lap, because she had pressed them on him.

Merle Dunaway had come, too. Nobody had asked him. He set his folding chair at the foot of her walk, in the grass, and opened his thermos.

Norma Haskell and Jolene Strunk stood at the far end of the porch with their purses held in front of them like church ushers. Twelve men. Four women. Nobody said anything. The wind rattled the tarp.

At two minutes past four, a gray crew-cab truck with Texas plates turned onto Poplar Street.

He parked at the curb, stepped down in his clean white shirt with the little roof on the pocket, and reached back in for the clipboard.

He saw the yard. I watched him see it. His step did not even hitch.

“Afternoon, gentlemen!” he called, coming up the walk. “Looks like Miss Fern has herself a crowd. I hope I’m not interrupting a church social.”

Nobody answered. Merle Dunaway looked at him from his lawn chair as if he had waited fifty years for him to come up that walk.

He came up the first step, smiling, with the clipboard held out in front of him like a hymnal. He came up the second.

Then he saw who was sitting on the swing beside Fern.

I watched it cross his face the way a cloud goes over a field. The smile did not fall off all at once. It slid.

“Miss Maureen,” Shane Koller said.

He said it very quietly.

What He Said on the Second Step

Nobody moved.

I had imagined this moment a hundred ways, in the dark, listening to the rain on my new roof. In some of them I screamed. What I did was set my coffee cup on the arm of the swing and say, “Hello, Shane.”

“Ma’am. I can explain.”

“Can you? I’d like that.”

He looked at the clipboard in his hand. He looked at the men.

“There’s been a misunderstanding. A supply problem. It’s been a hard season, and the dealer in Arkansas…”

“Mr. Koller,” said Kenny Marsh.

He had stepped out from behind Wendell, holding the letterhead, the sheet Lowell had taken from my folder. He is a mild man, and he sounded like one. “I’m with Midland Building Supply. That’s our name at the top of this paper. I’d like to know how you came to have it.”

Shane Koller’s mouth opened. Nothing came out.

“We don’t have an account for you,” said Kenny. “We never have.”

I watched him look at the paper, and at Kenny, and at the pastor and the men on the steps. Something changed in the way he stood. It was not guilt, exactly. It was a man at the end of a long walk sitting down on the first thing he finds.

He sat down on the second step, the one with the crack in it, with his clipboard in his lap.

“I didn’t mean to take that much,” he said.

Nobody said a word.