The Boy Who Raked Nine Yards

He learned that it was his, that it counted, that it got paid out loud in front of the man who owed it. I do not think $135 out of the Christmas can was too much to pay for that.

The winter was long that year. We had snow in January and again in February, and Rowan played his guitar through all of it, until his fingertips grew calluses as hard as pennies.

Then one Saturday morning in March, the sun came out warm for the first time, and the snow had gone off everything except the north side of the mountain.

Rowan was on the front steps practicing, and I was inside washing the breakfast dishes.

I heard a truck pull up. I looked out the window over the sink, and there was Harlan’s old pickup at our curb, with rakes and a roll of leaf bags in the bed.

Harlan got out slow and walked up the sidewalk. Rowan stopped playing and stood up. I dried my hands and went out on the porch.

“Morning, Shay,” Harlan said. He nodded at me, and then he turned to my son.

“Rowan,” he said, “I’ve got nine yards with a winter’s worth of mess in them. Wet leaves in every fence corner and sticks all over. I need them raked out before the grass comes up.”

Rowan looked at me. I did not say a word. It was his to answer.

“Yes, sir,” Rowan said. “I can do it.”

“Twenty a yard,” Harlan said. And then he reached into the pocket of his brown cardigan and took out his billfold, right there on our sidewalk, and counted a twenty-dollar bill into my son’s hand. “That’s for the first one. Up front. Get your gloves.”

Rowan raked all nine of Harlan’s yards that spring. Harlan paid him for every one the day he finished it, cash, in his hand, and wrote it down in his little carbon book the same as he writes down the rent.

By summer, half the street wanted Rowan to rake or mow. Delphine told everybody at church.

He saved up enough to buy a hard case for the guitar and a little secondhand amplifier from Abner, who sold it to him for what I am sure was a good deal less than it was worth.

He still plays on our front steps most afternoons. He plays at the Sunday night singing now, too, next to Ivo, the two of them side by side, an old man’s big hands and a boy’s long fingers on the same three chords.

Sometimes I think about that afternoon on Harlan’s porch. The leaves on the steps. The sun. My boy holding his money fanned out in his fingers like he could not believe it was real.

And then I think about that March morning, and Harlan standing on our sidewalk with his billfold out, counting a twenty into my son’s open hand before the work was even done. That is the picture I keep.

Harlan Voss hired Rowan back for the spring, and he paid him cash in hand.