The Boy Who Raked Nine Yards

The pawn shop is open until four on Saturdays, so we drove straight there. Abner Lusk was behind the counter in his reading glasses, sorting a box of old tools somebody had brought in.

Abner is sixty, a big quiet man who spent twenty years in the mines before his back gave out.

He has run that shop on the corner as long as Rowan has been alive, and he knows every family in town by what they have pawned and what they have bought back.

Rowan laid the money on the glass counter and smoothed it flat. “That’s $135,” he said. “And here’s $8.” He set his pickle-jar quarters down beside the bills in little stacks of four.

Abner counted it with one finger, slow. “That’s $143,” he said. “And you owe me $160 on the card.”

“I know,” Rowan said. “I’m $17 short. I’ll have it by next week. I swear I will.”

Abner looked at the money a long time. Then he looked at me, and I could tell somebody had already told him something.

In a town this size, news can beat you across town if the car in front of you drives slow enough.

“Card says the fifteenth,” Abner said. He took the yellow card out from behind the counter and turned it over, and wrote on the back of it, and slid it across to Rowan. “Now it says the twenty-second.”

Rowan picked it up and read it. “You’ll hold it another week?”

“A man who raked nine yards,” Abner said, “can have one more week. You keep your money till you’ve got it all. I’m not going anywhere, and neither is that guitar.”

We had a widow on our street named Delphine. She was eighty-one and lived alone in a little green house three doors down, with a big maple in the front yard that dropped every leaf it owned in one week.

She had been sitting on her porch in her coat on Sunday afternoon, the day after, when Rowan went by with Ivo’s guitar to sit on our steps.

She called out to him and asked if he was the boy who had raked all of Harlan Voss’s houses.

He said he was. She asked him what Harlan had paid him. Rowan, bless him, told her the truth. Fifteen dollars a yard.

“Well,” Delphine said, “that is a crime.” And she hired him on the spot to rake her yard for $20, cash, and told him to come Monday after school.

He raked her yard Monday afternoon until the sun went behind the ridge. Delphine sat on her porch and watched him the whole time, and when he was done she paid him with a twenty-dollar bill and a slice of jam cake wrapped in wax paper.

He came home with leaves in his hair and the cake in one hand and the twenty in the other, and he laid the twenty on the kitchen table next to the yellow card. “That’s $163,” he said. “I’ve got three dollars extra.”

On Tuesday after school, I picked him up and drove him to Abner’s. He would not let me come in.