The Boy Who Raked Nine Yards

When Rowan wants something small, he asks right away. When he wants something big, he goes quiet and starts doing math.

On the third day he sat down at the kitchen table across from me while I was eating my supper at four in the afternoon, which is when I eat when I work the early shift. “Mama,” he said, “how much does a person make raking leaves?”

I want to be fair to Harlan Voss, because I have thought about this a long time and fair is the only way I know how to tell it.

Harlan was sixty-eight that year. He owned nine rental houses scattered around Bluefield, mostly little two-bedroom places like ours, built back when the railroad was hiring and every hollow had a family in it.

He was not a slumlord. When our water heater went out the January before, he came himself the same afternoon in his old pickup, carried the new one in on a hand truck, and had it hooked up before Rowan got home from school.

He did not raise our rent for three years. He let me pay late once, when Rowan had his tonsils out, and he never charged me the fee.

He was a hard, plain, tight old man, and I had always thought of him as an honest one.

So when Rowan asked me how a boy could earn money, I thought of Harlan first. It was late October.

The maples and oaks on every one of his rentals were coming down all at once, the way they do in the mountains when the first hard frost hits.

I asked Harlan on rent day in October. I stood on his porch with my envelope and said, “My boy wants work. He’ll rake. He’s a good worker and he’s careful.”

Harlan looked at Rowan, who was waiting by the car, and he rubbed his jaw. “Fifteen a yard,” he said.

Then he named his terms. “All nine of them. I’ll drive him. He bags it and sets it at the curb, and I pay him when he’s done with the last one.”

Fifteen dollars a yard was cheap, and I knew it. The man down the road with the leaf blower charged forty.

But Rowan was thirteen and nobody else was offering, and when I told him, he jumped so high he hit his head on the kitchen doorframe.

For three Saturdays in a row, Harlan’s pickup pulled up in front of our house at eight in the morning.

Rowan was always out on the steps before it stopped, with my old work gloves and a thermos of hot chocolate.

Harlan supplied the rakes and the bags. He would drop Rowan at one house, go on to see about a leaky faucet or a stuck window at another, and come back around noon to carry him to the next yard.

Rowan raked three yards every Saturday. The houses on the hill had the worst of it, oak leaves wet and heavy and packed down in the corners of the fences. The Wythe Street yard took him almost four hours by himself.