The Checkbook My Son Kept for Me

What the Room Decided

I had thought what I wanted was to hear him say it. Standing on that little stage, I found I wanted something more, and I could not say what.

Roscoe Kitzmiller saved me from having to. He had come up on the other side of the lectern. He put one big hand on Darren’s shoulder and spoke into the microphone slowly.

“Darren, I am going to say what this room is going to do, and you can take it or leave it.”

My son nodded.

“The seat stays open. You are not on the slate this year. Maybe not next year, and we will see about the one after.”

“That is fair,” Darren said.

“You are going to sell that Mack truck.”

I felt him flinch.

“You are going to sell it this week and put every dollar of it into your father’s account at Perry Valley Savings, with Mrs. Strawser as witness. What is left after that, you owe him by the month.”

“Yes, sir.”

“And I will tell you what else,” Roscoe said, in the voice of a man who has called the vote on a hundred matters. “Every man in this room with a pond to dig or a lane to grade is going to give that work to Eshelman Excavating. Half the check gets written to Lloyd. Half stays with you, for your crew and your diesel. Until the number is zero.”

There was a pause. Then somebody at the back said, “I have got a lane.”

“I have a culvert,” said another voice.

“My pond,” Delmar called from the head table. “It has needed doing since the Carter administration.”

The room laughed, soft and wet and tired, the way people do when a thing they were dreading has turned out to be something they can bear.

I understood then what they were doing. They were not punishing him. They were handing him a road back, and it ran through every farm in the valley.

“Is that agreeable to you, Lloyd?” Roscoe said.

I stood there with my hand on my cane. I thought about the forty-one steps and Gail’s silence, and the boy on the milk crate.

“It is,” I said.

Darren took a step toward me. He did not know what to do with his hands. Then he put them out, the way you would to a man on a slippery porch, and I did not pull away.

I let him take my elbow.