The Boy Who Raked Nine Yards

“Mama,” he said. “I learned one. A whole one. Ivo showed me how it goes in G.”

And he played “Amazing Grace.”

He played it slow, and he missed the change to the C chord once and had to go back, and his voice cracked on the high part the way thirteen-year-old voices do.

But he played it all the way through, every verse he knew, sitting on our steps in the November sun with the leaves blowing across the yard.

I did not cry until the last verse. Then I could not stop. He kept playing anyway.

He did not look up, because he is a kind boy and knew I did not want him to see, and he just played it one more time from the beginning so I would have time to finish.

Delphine had come out on her porch three doors down. She was standing there in her coat with her hand on the post, listening.

When he finished, she clapped, a little old-lady clap, and called out, “Again!” So he played it again.

On the fifteenth of December, Rowan and I went to Harlan’s porch to pay the rent.

It was cold and gray in the morning but the sun came out by noon, and Harlan’s yard was bare, the leaves long since bagged and hauled.

Harlan came out in his brown cardigan. I gave him the rent envelope and counted it into his hand the same as always, $650, and he wrote me my receipt in his carbon book.

He did not say anything about November. But when he tore off the receipt and handed it to me, he looked past me at Rowan, standing by the car. “You still playing that guitar, son?”

“Yes, sir,” Rowan said. “Every day.”

Harlan nodded. “Good,” he said. That was all.

On the way home, Rowan said, “He’s not a bad man, is he, Mama.”

“No,” I said. “He’s not a bad man. He just had it wrong. Sometimes it takes somebody standing in front of you to show you where you had it wrong.”

I want to say plainly what that November cost us, because I think it matters.

We had a small Christmas. Rowan got a coat from the church clothes closet that fit him and a pair of jeans.

We had a ham. I put a five-dollar pick and a songbook from Abner’s in his stocking.

He did not care. He said it was the best Christmas he ever had, and I believe he meant it, because he spent most of Christmas Day sitting on the couch learning “Silent Night” off that songbook while the ham cooked.

I have thought about whether I did right. Whether I should have just taken the $515 and let it go, the way most people would.

Harlan was going to keep that $135 one way or the other. In the end, I paid it myself.

But here is what I know. My boy did not learn that his work could be spent by somebody else without asking.