Dad’s Rocker Comes Home to Elm Street

It was one of those November days that comes along once or twice before the snow, when the sun is warm on your face and the air is still and you can smell the leaves. It was fifty two degrees at two o’clock.

Dad asked if he could sit outside. So I carried his rocker out to my porch and set it in the sun near the top of the steps, and I put a quilt over his knees, and he sat there in his cardigan with his cane against the rail.

Esther saw us from across the street. Ten minutes later she came over in her brown coat with two cups of coffee on a little tray and sat down in my wicker chair beside him.

I sat on the top step with my own coffee. The two of them talked about the old high school. They talked about the year the river flooded and the year the mill went on strike, and a teacher who used to throw chalk at boys who talked in class.

At three thirty, Garth’s truck turned onto Elm Street.

It is a big gray pickup, new last spring, the one with the six hundred and forty dollar payment. It came slowly down the block, the way you drive when you are looking for a house. Then it pulled up at the curb in front of mine and stopped.

Garth got out. He was still in his mill clothes, his canvas jacket and his steel toed boots, with his sunglasses pushed up on his head. He looked tired. My brother always looks tired now.

He came up my front walk with his hand already out.

I do not think he saw Esther at first. I think he saw Dad, and the rocker, and the quilt, and he looked at Dad the way you look at a mailbox.

“Dad,” he said. “It’s the third. I’ll take that envelope.”

Dad did not move. He had his hands on the arms of his rocker. He looked at Garth, and his face was not angry. It was only sad, the way he looks at a good board that has gone and warped on him.

Nobody said anything for a second. Benedikt from two doors down had stopped raking his leaves. The mail carrier had stopped at the bottom of my walk with a handful of envelopes.

Esther set her coffee cup down on the porch rail.

Then she stood up.

She is not a big woman. She is maybe five foot one in her house slippers. But she stood up out of that wicker chair like a woman who taught Sunday school for forty years, and she looked down at my brother from the top of my porch steps.

“Garth Kampe,” she said, in a voice that carried to the end of the block. “I have known you since the day you were baptized. So I will ask you plain.”

Garth looked up at her. His hand was still out.

“How was the porch room in November?” Esther said.

That was all. She did not raise her voice past what it took to be heard. She did not call him a name. She just asked him the question, out loud, on Elm Street, in front of his father and his sister and the mail carrier and Benedikt with his rake.

Garth opened his mouth. Nothing came out of it.

He looked at Dad. Dad looked back at him. Dad did not say a word to help him, and that was the hardest thing I ever saw my father do, because Dad has been helping Garth out of trouble since Garth was four years old.