The Three Acres I Mowed for Nell

They were just doing what you do out here when a widow’s grass is high. It was the same thing Pop would have done, and had done, many times over, for many of them.

It all goes around, out here. It always has.

The week went by. I drove my summer school route every morning, and every afternoon on the way back to the lot I looked up at that hill.

The grass was growing back, but the path was still there, and every time I saw it I felt my chest loosen a little.

I didn’t plan to go over the next Saturday. Lonzo had told me not to. But I woke up at 5:30 anyway, out of habit or something like it, and by seven I was standing in my kitchen with my keys in my hand.

I didn’t take the mower. I took the car. I told myself I was just going to drive by and make sure, and maybe take Nell some of the strawberries I had picked on Thursday.

When I came around the bend by the dairy, I could already hear an engine. And there was Lonzo, out in Nell’s yard on his old mower, going up and down the hill in the morning sun, the way I had a week before.

I pulled off at the bottom of Nell’s lane, by the gate, and got out.

I didn’t want to interrupt him. I thought I’d just wait till he came down and hand him a cold drink.

And then I heard a truck behind me.

I knew that engine too. I turned around, and it was Brent’s pickup, the one with the dent in the tailgate, turning off the county road and starting up his mother’s lane.

He didn’t see me at first. I was standing off to the side of the gate, in the shade of the walnut tree.

He drove right past me, slow, and stopped up by the house.

I put my hand on the gate post and stood very still.

Up on the hill, Lonzo saw the truck. He finished his pass, came to the bottom, and shut his mower off.

The quiet came down over that hillside all at once, and I could hear the creek and a cardinal somewhere in that big tree.

Brent got out of his truck. He stood there a second with the door open, looking at Lonzo. Then he shut the door and started walking across the cut grass toward him.

I could not hear every word. They were maybe a hundred yards from me. But I could see them both plain as day in the morning sun, and I have known both of those men a long time, and I could hear enough.

Brent stopped about ten feet from the mower. He had his hands in his back pockets, the way he always stands when he is uneasy. He said something I couldn’t make out.

Lonzo didn’t get off the mower. He just sat there with his hands on his knees and looked at Brent for a long moment.

Then he said, “Your daddy mowed my place every week the summer I had my back surgery. Three months. He never once said a thing about it.”

Brent looked down at the ground.

“I’m just paying him back,” Lonzo said. “Somebody has to.”

That was all he said. He didn’t raise his voice. He didn’t tell Brent what kind of son he was.