I told him about her looking out the kitchen window every two minutes.
He listened to all of it without saying a word. When I got to the window part, he took his cap off and looked at the inside of it for a while and then put it back on.
“Verla and Marjorie hunted that north slope of mine every spring for I don’t know how many years,” he said. “Thirty, anyway. Then Verla passed and Marjorie quit coming over.”
“I know,” I said.
“I always figured she’d come back over when she was ready. I didn’t want to push.” He rubbed his jaw. “That slope’s grown up some since. Multiflora rose and gooseberry. She couldn’t get through it with a cane.”
Get a new story in your inbox every morning.
Facebook doesn’t show you every story we post. Our free newsletter does. Join 2,500+ readers.
“No sir.”
“When’s she want to go?”
I just looked at him.
“Saturday morning?” he said. “Bring her Saturday. I’ll have a way in for her.”
“Ferris, I didn’t come here to ask you to do work.”
“You didn’t ask,” he said. “I’m telling you. Saturday. Tell her to wear her boots. That gravel bar’s still slick.”
I cried a little in the car on the way back to town. I had to fix my face in the parking lot before I went back in to do lice checks on the second grade.
I did not tell Grandma what I had done until Thursday. I was half afraid she would say no out of pride. I drove out after school and sat with her on the porch and told her Ferris wanted her to come over Saturday.
She was quiet for a long time.
“He said that?” she said.
“He said tell you to wear your boots. He said the gravel bar is still slick.”
She laughed then, a real laugh, the first one I had heard out of her all week.
“It always was,” she said. “Verla went in up to her knees in 1988. I never let her forget it.”
Friday after school I drove past Ferris’s place on my way to Grandma’s and looked down toward the creek from the road. I could see a line through the brush on his north slope, a cleared path wide enough for a person, switching back and forth across the hill.
Somebody had cut it by hand. You could see the fresh stumps of the multiflora rose, cut low and clean.
Later I found out Ferris had been out there three days with a pair of loppers and a brush saw. Eighty-three years old. He had hauled the cuttings off to the side so there would be nothing for a cane to catch on.
His granddaughter Paisley, who is ten and stays with him after school while her mother works at the nursing home in Mount Sterling, had helped him drag brush on Thursday and Friday. She told me so herself. She was very proud of the scratches on her arms.