The Hall Light Left On for Teague

At ten after five on a Saturday morning in November, I poured two cups of coffee, the way I had every morning for nine months.

One went in front of me. The other went across the table, in front of the empty chair with the cane seat my husband re-wove the winter before he died.

I drink mine slow. When the second cup goes cold, I drink that one too, so it will not be wasted. I know how that sounds, but I am seventy-eight years old and I have never wasted a cup of coffee in my life.

The kitchen was dark except for the light over the stove. Outside, the pecans were coming down on the tin roof of the shed, one at a time, like somebody patient was throwing dimes.

Gus, my old bluetick hound, lay on the linoleum with his chin on his paws. He is nearly deaf now, so he sleeps through the pecans, the thunder, and most of what I tell him.

On the icebox hung the calendar from Ledbetter’s Feed and Seed, the one with a different tractor every month. Every night I crossed off a square with a red pencil, and every morning I counted what was left.

That morning the count was thirty-seven.

Thirty-seven days until the twenty-second of December, the day my grandson Teague had said he might be home. Maybe the end of the month, he told me. Maybe January. I circled the twenty-second anyway, because a woman my age has to circle something.

Sergeant Teague Wofford of the Mississippi Army National Guard was in Kuwait, driving a truck in a convoy across a desert I could find in the atlas he bought me but could not pronounce. He had been gone nine months and four days.

He made sergeant over there. The letter came in August, and I framed it and hung it in the hall beside his senior picture.

Over the door of his bedroom, in that same hall, burned a forty-watt bulb in a plain glass fixture. It was on that morning. It had been on every night for nineteen years.

I will tell you why. It is the whole story, really. Everything else is just what happened around it.

The night he came

I did not raise Teague because I planned to. Nobody plans a thing like that, and anybody who says they did is selling something.

I had already raised my own two. My son Robert Lee lives in Texas and sends a card on Mother’s Day, and he is a good man. My daughter Faye was the baby, and she was the one who gave me trouble.

I will not set it all down here, because Faye is still my child and still living, in a small apartment in Memphis. She writes me every Christmas in the same careful hand she had in the third grade.

She had Teague at nineteen. His father was a boy from Tupelo she knew one summer, and I never laid eyes on him.

For six years she tried. I want to say that plainly. She tried with a baby on her hip in three apartments and two cities, and when it got bad she came home to my kitchen, and I fed them and sent them off again with a sack of groceries.

Then, on a warm night in May, the year Teague was seven, headlights came up my gravel road at eleven o’clock.