The Winter We Picked Our Own Heat

At church he sat in his usual place, three pews from the back on the left side, where he and Grandpa had sat for forty years.

Edna sat behind him every Sunday of her life. That Sunday she came in, looked at the pew, and walked up and sat with us.

Nobody said a word to him. Nobody was rude. It was just that the men who usually stood with him on the steps after the service found something else to talk about, and the women who usually asked about his blood pressure did not.

I want to be honest that I did not enjoy that. I thought I would.

I sat there through “Come, Ye Thankful People, Come” and watched the back of his neck, and all I could think about was Grandpa sitting beside him in that same spot.

After the benediction I walked back to his pew. He was putting on his coat. He looked at me, waiting for whatever I had come to say.

“Thanksgiving is at one o’clock,” I said. “Same as always. There will be a chair for you. It’s warm in the house.”

He did not answer. He finished buttoning his coat and walked out the side door to his truck. But he did not say no, either, and with Vernon that was more than I expected.

Thanksgiving

Our ear corn dried down in the snow fence over the next two weeks, just like Rudy said.

By the third week of November it tested fourteen and a half on Rudy’s tester, and I started shelling it for the stove alongside Rudy’s gold corn from the bin.

The house was warm by Thanksgiving. Not just warm enough. Warm. I opened the back bedroom for the first time since October, and Maisy took off her stocking cap at the supper table without anybody asking her to.

Rudy and his wife came for pie. Edna came for dinner and brought her noodles. Clement stopped in with a jar of sorghum.

Asa sat at the end of the table where Grandpa used to sit, and nobody told him to, and nobody told him not to.

The chair I set for Vernon stayed empty. I left his plate on the table until we had all finished, and then I put it back in the cupboard and did not say anything about it. The kids did not either.

He never came to the house that winter. But on the Sunday before Christmas, when we came out of church, there was a sack of oranges on the seat of my pickup, the kind Grandpa used to buy for the kids every Christmas, and nobody at church had seen who put it there.

I know who put it there. I let it be.

Maisy kept the husking peg in her coat pocket all winter. She took it to school. She took it to the dentist.

When her teacher asked what it was, she said it was a tool for getting your heat out of a field, and the teacher wrote me a note to ask if that was a real thing.

I wrote back that it was the realest thing I know.

The house was warm by Thanksgiving, and it stayed warm until the dandelions came.

The crib on Vernon’s place sat empty all winter, with his padlock on it and the wind rattling the loose door.