The Hall Light Left On for Teague

What the town had been doing

I learned one more thing that afternoon, from Brother Dub, at the edge of my yard, with tears on his cheeks.

The night before Teague left, he had sat in the preacher’s study for an hour and asked for exactly one thing. “He said, ‘I’m not asking you to take care of her. She’d skin me. I’m asking you to be neighbors.'”

And they had been, all nine months. The propane tank was never empty. The leaning back step I had been after Ferris about for twenty years was replaced one July afternoon while I was at the doctor’s. The county did it, Orvis told me.

The county did not do it. Orvis did it with two church men and a level.

I knew it. I am not a foolish woman. I knew somebody was watching over me, and I was too proud to say so. A woman can be proud and glad both. I have been both a hundred times.

The road at five o’clock

There is one more piece, and it is the one that undid me. I did not hear it until that night.

The flight came into Tupelo past eleven on Thursday. Captain Delgado met it and drove Teague by the back roads to Brother Dub’s house on the far side of the church, so nobody on the highway would see.

Teague did not sleep Friday night. At four on Saturday morning, he put on his boots and walked the mile and a half to my house, alone, in the dark, with his duffel left in the captain’s trunk.

He told me this in the hall that night, with his back against the wall and his knees pulled up, exactly the way he had sat at seven.

He came around the bend at about ten minutes to five. And he could see it from a half mile off, the only light in the whole dark country, a small yellow square at the end of my house.

“I’ve been looking at pictures of that light on my phone for nine months, Granny, and it’s not the same. I stood there at the end of your road and just looked at it.”

His breath smoked in the cold, he said, and the sky was black over the cotton. At ten after five, the kitchen light came on.

“I saw you go past the window. I could tell it was you from how you walk, a little to the left, on that hip. I watched you go to the cabinet and take down two cups.”

I put my hand over my mouth.

“I saw you pour two,” he said. “I stood there in the dark and watched you set one across from you, and I about came apart right there on the county road. The captain pulled up and I told him to give me a minute. He gave me about thirty.”

Then the captain had driven him around by the logging road and let him out behind the pond. He came up through the pecan trees and across the back lot, and he stood on my back steps listening to me scold a captain about a third egg. Gus, who is nearly deaf, never lifted his head. But Gus has a nose, and I think he knew.

“Why didn’t you just come to the door?” I said.

“I wanted to. Believe me. But I’d promised the preacher.” He smiled a little. “And I wanted to see what you did with the second cup.”

“You’d have been surprised,” I said. “I drink it.”

“I know you do, Granny.”